


Revisionist History

by candle_beck



Category: Baseball RPF
Genre: First Time, High School AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-22
Updated: 2011-09-22
Packaged: 2017-10-23 22:45:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/255896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/candle_beck/pseuds/candle_beck
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zito is a drunk and a pothead and seventeen years old, pitching for the best high school baseball team in the country and still kind of in love with one of his best friends, and wanting to sleep with his new coach is really the least of his problems.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Revisionist History

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted October 2006. In real life, Erics Chavez and Munson attended the same high school Billy Beane did, so I just threw Zito in there and made Billy their bitter alcoholic coach. Possibly my favorite baseball fic of them all.

Revisionist History  
By Candle Beck

 

On the first day of the new season, Zito wakes up with a rollerskate under his head.

There’s a kid nearby, black-haired kid with bare feet, eating a Hot Pocket and studying him from above. Zito doesn’t recognize him, nor this two-car garage with its bikes like cages and dusty cardboard boxes piled waist-high.

He begs for coffee, though he honestly hates coffee, it’s the only thing he can think of. Familiar wreck of a hangover dragging down his shoulders, six in the morning on a Monday, still shy of spring. But Zito hasn’t figured that out again.

The house is another Eichler, white plaster walls and posterboard doors, and the kid’s name is, “Dan. Danny,” and he’s looking back over his shoulder at Zito, leading him to the kitchen.

The coffee is sour and stale, but Zito doesn’t care. His back cracks every time he moves. In the side of the toaster, he sees the red wheel-shaped indent on his cheek, a fingerprint of grime on his jaw.

Zito asks, “Where are we?” and Danny tells him Monterey Park. Zito’s surprised, farther than he thought, run out of town again. Danny’s fingers are shining with grease, sitting on the counter with his heels tocking against the low cabinet.

Zito finds his shirt under the kitchen table. Danny drinks orange juice straight from the bottle, head thrown back and throat moving smoothly, and Zito notices that he’s pretty fucking hot, albeit criminally young. Zito’s only seventeen, though, so he can’t get in trouble.

“Don’t think I’m, like, the rudest person in the world,” Zito says through his blinding headache, “but did we fuck around last night?”

Danny squints at him sideways, pulling off the bottle with a pop. He grins messy, pulp between his teeth. “Sure did.”

And Zito grins back, good, good, dry-swallows four Excedrin and says he’s got to take off. Danny walks him to the door, kisses him hard and lets him go. Zito bangs through the screen door, hollering over his shoulder, see you around, and then he’s running, railroaded, finally remembering what day it is.

He’ll never make it in time.

*

This is how he’s spent most of his senior year.

Couches and backseats and the alley next to the garage, out behind the gym, in the middle of the outfield long after the sun has set. Zito ends up at parties without a clear sequence of events. He wakes up even worse, and sometimes there’s a guy, sometimes there’s not.

Zito might graduate or he might just get drafted, he might drop out and take a job at his cousin’s photo shop. He’s drunk most of the time, but that’s just unstable denial, not having to think about where he is or where he’s going or what’s wrong with him.

All he’s trying to do right now is survive the next six months.

*

Zito remembers a little bit, twenty miles over the speed limit burning south down the highway. Window open, slamming his hair back, he remembers the late afternoon decision to go to L.A., a friend of a friend of a friend’s party. Maybe even Danny, but probably not, because Zito’s life never comes together that neatly.

He was already drunk, letting someone else drive his car, string-cut in the back. Watching the shadows move across the padded ceiling. Too far to go, really, for a house party, but there were supposed to be kegs and Hawaiian weed. Shiny new people, halloween lights in the backyard, and a good-looking sophomore to suck Zito off in the garage after his friends had abandoned him.

Zito calls his parents from a pay phone outside city limits, leaves a message on the machine saying that he’s still alive.

He makes better time than he thought. The parking lot’s full, so he skids back around a side street and is relieved that his gear is still in the trunk. He ducks through some bushes, scratching up his hands. In the northwest corner, backed up by chainlink and trees, he sees a well-known Volvo, maroon-colored and dented all to hell, two familiar shapes visible through the window.

Zito crashes into the backseat, into a haze of smoke. Munson cries intruder and pelts him with coins. Chavez’s face swims in the rearview mirror.

“Knock that shit off, Munce, I’m hungover.”

He is, too, now that he’s not moving at high speeds anymore, his battered headache only slightly dimmed by the painkillers. He lies down on the seat and curls up, clutching his elbows in his hands.

“Sorry fucking sight, isn’t he?” Munson says to Chavez. Chavez blinks down at Zito and reaches through the seats, brushes his fingertips across the bruise on Zito’s face, asks him what happened.

Zito watches the smoke filter through the smudgy sunlight, catching out twists and ribbons. “Slept on a rollerskate.”

Munson bursts into giggles, choking and curving his shoulders down to take a hit off the blue glassy. Zito thinks about Danny’s mouth open on his stomach.

“You disappeared,” Chavez tells him. “Your dad called my house.”

Oh Jesus Christ. Zito squeezes his eyes shut and bites the skiddy slick vinyl of the seat, crossing his fingers under his arms. But he’s got nothing to worry about. Chavez lied for him, same as always. Zito snakes his arm between the seats and captures the pipe, taking an awkward sideways hit and then another and then another, until his headache is a memory and Munson calls him out, fucking bogart.

Zito’s eyes are bright red. They repack the bowl a couple more times, talking about the new season that will begin at three-fifteen this afternoon, the rumor of a new coach.

Chavez slithers into the back, laughing hard, and collapses on top of Zito, whooshing the air out of him. Chavez’s legs are in the seat well and his head is on Zito’s chest and Zito can taste the gel Chavez uses in his hair, acrid and tearing up his throat.

Chavez asks him if he’s okay, and Zito pffts, like he hasn’t gotten through worse. Munson, alone in the shotgun seat, taps the ash out into the ashtray, leaving a black circle on the palm of his hand, and downs a Coke.

“C’mon, we’re gonna be late.”

The door opens on the morning and Zito hisses like something undead. Chavez mumbles against his shoulder, “You’re wearing the same stuff as yesterday,” and then crawls out headfirst, hands on the asphalt.

A long way off across the parking lot, the chunky brown buildings of Mount Carmel High School await them.

*

They’ve known each other since junior high. Zito moved into the yellow house three blocks down from Eric Chavez’s when he was twelve years old. Came across Chavez and Munson in a tree at the end of summer, matched faces like balloons among the leaves.

They hated each other for awhile, dirt wars, kidnapped bikes. Chavez slashed the laces of Zito’s mitt with his penknife and Zito was astonished by how much that hurt. Munson slammed Zito’s face into the dry grass until he cried, kneeling on his back, and two days later Zito chucked a rock at the back of Chavez’s head and knocked him out cold for five minutes.

But eventually they were all three of them invited to the same birthday party, autumn of their seventh grade year, and they got drunk on a stolen bottle of red wine, behind the bushes in the backyard. Munson got sick against the fence and Chavez kissed Zito on the mouth and after that they were best friends.

Later, they wouldn’t remember what they’d ever fought about.

*

They meet up behind the gym after classes have gotten out. The three of them, with sunken bruised eyes, are recovering tiredly from being stoned all day. Chavez is slumped on Munson’s back, his lower lip chewed raw.

Zito unearths caffeine pills from some downward pocket of his backpack, chalk in the back of his throat, and they fill up their water bottles at the fountain, washing their hands. Munson is psychosomatic; long before the caffeine could have any reasonable effect on him, he’s talking faster and drumming his fists on Chavez’s shoulder.

Chavez yawns, crack-jawed, and Zito splashes water on his face, gleaming black in Chavez’s hair.

They change in the locker room, awoken by the echo of their teammates’ voices. Chavez starts to grin again, watching Munson take off his shirt from the corner of his eye. Zito rests his forehead on the cool metal for a minute, another season, senior year.

Chavez’s fingers hook in Zito’s belt, whispering, “Maintain.”

The team heads for the field, laughing and jostling each other into walls. February in San Diego, like April anywhere else, rich green and warm enough for shirtsleeves. The field is trimmed to the millimeter, the dirt raked and bases freshly laid. Zito breathes in, the long winter skimming away. In a week, he won’t even remember.

There’s someone new, gathered with the other coaches, watching them straggle onto the infield. His face is familiar like maybe Zito saw him on the highway at some point, dark--haired and handsome, tension in the corners of his mouth.

Munson pushes his elbow into Zito’s side. “New coach, huh?”

“Guess so.”

Chavez tips his head to the side. “I. Do we know him? Doesn’t he look like someone we know?”

Zito shrugs. Caffeine pills and sunlight together have rendered him monosyllabic, wild blood under his skin, fearful of movement. He wishes idly that the season weren’t starting today, that they were over at Munson’s house smoking in the backyard, laid out on the grass with the wooden fence the limit of the world.

The team is in one place again. Chattering nervously and plucking at their gloves, squinting from under the brims of their caps, and the coaches come to some agreement, turn to face them. The new one steps in front, running a distracted hand through his hair.

“Okay, which of you are pitchers?”

They’re quiet, blinking at him like kids. Their coach’s eyebrows pull down. “Was that a tough question or something? Pitchers, come on, hands up.”

Slowly, Zito and Chavez and half the others creep their hands into the air. The coach counts them quickly, his mouth moving. Chavez gives Zito a pinched look, the sun in his eyes.

“All right. Catchers?”

Munson shoots his hand up without hesitation, grinning stupid-big. Zito wants to smack him upside the head, seeing the way Chavez is smirking and looking at the ground. Chavez lets Munson get away with everything.

“Too many goddamned pitchers,” the coach mutters at the others behind him. They nod, watching him closely. The new coach exhales heavily.

“Over the next week or so, we’re gonna figure out who belongs where. Some of you think you’re pitchers, but it’ll turn out you’re, like, second basemen. So don’t get too fucking attached.”

He stops, his mouth twisting as he spits in the dirt. “I’m not supposed to swear anymore, so don’t tell your fucking parents, all right?”

Zito watches him with wide eyes.

“Practice starts fifteen minutes after the last bell, and we go until it gets dark. Every day. Ten to four on Saturdays. Is that gonna be a problem for anyone?”

It’s twice what they did last year, and last year they won the league. Zito clutches at Chavez’s arm, tell him no, tell him that’s insane, but Chavez is dead quiet and so are the rest of them. Zito can foresee months of exhaustion, too tired to sleep.

The new coach scans them, his eyes black. His sharp features are perfect in the sun, younger than they’re used to. “You don’t know me and you don’t trust me, that’s fine. This team is not about me. But you’re still gonna do what I say.” He smiles, looking suddenly cruel. “I know what it’s like down here. I own all the records that matter at this school, and this year, we’re gonna shatter every fucking one.”

Chavez sucks in air fast between his teeth, the chainlink squealing at his back. “Fuck,” he says under his breath. “It’s Billy Beane.”

*

Billy Beane.

There is a trophy case right when you first come into the school, windex-shiny in the morning, and Billy Beane’s shadowed reckless face, standing out neatly against his red and white uniform, surrounded by gold.

Billy Beane is history, the boy they are all chasing.

Beane tore Mount Carmel up. Their old coach used to use him as an example to highlight everything they were doing wrong. Billy Beane had pitched a shutout in the last varsity game of the season as a freshman. Billy Beane had hit three triples in one game because they couldn’t move back far enough in the fenceless field. Billy Beane had five tools and a good face and always hit the cut-off man.

Billy Beane had been drafted in the first round by the New York Mets when he was eighteen years old, and his life had gone downhill from there.

*

Run ragged by their first practice, Chavez and Munson and Zito pile into Chavez’s car and ride to the beach. The sun is a slim orange hook over the water, almost gone. Beane had been true to his word, hadn’t let them go until a half hour after the streetlights had come on.

Munson has a red plaid camping thermos full of rum and coke, and under the backseat’s domelight Chavez rolls a joint on his knees, Zito’s arm around his shoulder to keep him steady. They lie on the sand, rushed by the waves. Zito’s in more pain than he thought possible after only one day.

“I’m quitting,” he says to the blackening sky.

“Shut up, you are not,” Munson says, filling the thermos cap and balancing it carefully on Zito’s stomach. Zito feels the liquid shift and roll as he breathes.

Chavez inhales slowly, a long stream of smoke shot upwards. “I kinda like him.”

Munson laughs at that, but Zito doesn’t know why. Every time he moves, his joints crackle, his muscles rubber-banded and loose under his skin. He lifts his head and drains the thermos cap, coughing.

“He’s not gonna let you pitch, Ricky,” Zito points out. Chavez had thrown five perfunctory pitches for Beane and then been shuttled off to the infielders for the rest of the afternoon, footwork, positioning, reading the ball off the bat, two steps to the right on an off-speed pitch.

Towards the end of practice, Beane had set up the pitching machine at home plate and fired dimpled yellow plastic balls at them, skipping and slamming through the dust. Even the pitchers weren’t spared, and the catchers had to start from the crouch. Zito could feel the pockmarks on his shoulders and ribs.

“He might. I don’t know what that ‘too many pitchers’ shit was about. How the hell can you have too many pitchers?”

Zito doesn’t answer, watching the stars come out. Chavez is near his elbow, Munson on Chavez’s other side. The joint bites at his fingers, handprint shapes in the sand.

Chavez and Munson are talking quietly, heads rolled together. Zito is ninety-eight percent sure that the two of them invented a secret language when they were kids and still speak in it sometimes. Chavez and Munson were best friends for five years before Zito showed up.

Zito won’t quit the team, he’s just talking shit. He takes a last hit of the jay and the smoke batters apart in the air. He doesn’t hurt so much anymore, pleasant draining soreness and his half-remembered promise to sleep at home tonight. He hasn’t seen his parents in three days.

Beane had pointed to Zito against the fence and said, “Show me your best pitch.”

Zito threw the curve to Munson behind the plate and waited for Beane’s expression to drop into something startled and blank, same as always the first time someone saw what he could do, but it hadn’t happened.

It makes Zito feel decidedly off-balance.

“Barry, hey.” Chavez presses his face into Zito’s shoulder, breath hot through Zito’s shirt. “Munce’s wasted already.”

Zito touches Chavez’s side absently, ranking his fingers on the hard line of muscle. Somewhere in the background, Eric Munson is giggling.

*

That night, after diner food and coffee to sober up, Zito gets home past midnight and there’s a note on the kitchen table reminding him to get the oil in his car changed, and twenty dollars in fives and tens for the week’s lunch money. His parents are asleep.

Zito crashes into bed still wearing his jeans, his head spinning. The pink moon clings to the garage roof out his window. Zito puts a new tape in his Walkman and unbuttons his fly. With all the lights off, he pictures Danny’s wet mouth and Eric Chavez’s hands, scratch of teeth on cotton, but he’s still pretty fucked up and Billy Beane’s changeless face is what reoccurs.

*

Class is endless. Zito sleeps through Economics, and at break Munson laughs at him, tells him he’s got pencil on his face. Two words are still legible from his notes, transferred from paper to still-bruised skin: _forces of_.

Zito licks his fingers and rubs it off, goes with Munson out behind the gym and they kick a can back and forth, sharing a Coke and some potato chips. The bell explodes overhead, and they separate near the library. Chavez is in his Cold War class, his head already on the desk when Zito comes in.

“Still alive?”

Chavez’s eyes crack open. “Would you be quiet, please.”

Zito wants to touch his face pretty badly.

Their teacher announces a quiz and they exchange panicked looks. They fumble, cheat their way through it, flashing each other signs and letters and mouthing, what’d you get for number four?

It’s never really worked for them, and Zito is rubbing his face without realizing it, pressing firmly over the jut of his cheekbone.

His lighter is dead, a burned patch on his thumb. Chavez teaches Zito to light matches one-handed and they hotbox his car during lunch, Chavez sitting against the door with his legs across Munson’s lap.

“Are you going to English?” Chavez asks Zito, rolling his head back on the foggy window.

“Oh god. No.” Zito counts quickly on his fingers, but he can’t remember the last time he made it to that class.

“You should come with me, then. We gotta buy a new bat.”

Munson had broken their old one over the weekend, inside-out on Zito’s make-believe slider, long splinter in the wood and Chavez had made Zito keep pitching to him until the barrel shattered.

They had decided when they were fourteen to prepare themselves in every way. They only used aluminum bats at school.

“Do we have enough money?”

Zito twists to look between the seats. Munson’s head is back, his starry red eyes blinking at the ceiling, but he doesn’t owe anything on this because he’s been buying their pot all month. Chavez levers up to get his wallet from his back pocket, thumbing through the bills with his lips moving as he counts. Zito unearths his lunch money and hands it over. Eric Chavez smiles at him, slow and pretty in the midday light.

The three of them have lived communally since they were thirteen.

“Forty-two,” Chavez pronounces.

“Not enough,” Munson chimes in, surprising Zito, who thought he wasn’t paying attention. “And don’t say we can just get one of those ash ones, either. Not fucking around with that shit anymore, Chav, fucking thing breaks like glass if I hit it off the end even a little bit, like, you wanna know why it’s only thirty dollars, it’s because it _sucks_ , and-”

“ _Okay_.” Chavez kicks him in the ribs. “God. We’ll find eight dollars somewhere and get you a fucking maple bat. Or you could fucking whine about it some more.”

Munson drops his head down and grins untidily at him. Zito watches as Chavez’s mouth softens, his toes curling on Munson’s stomach. Zito looks away.

“You think we’ll get back in time for practice?” he asks, his throat thick, tongue sticky-dry. The parking lot gleams and seems to be miles underwater, shimmering through the dirty windows of the car.

“I’m not gonna risk anything on the second day,” Chavez answers, but he’s still looking at Munson and Zito’s chest hurts.

*

In the sporting goods store, Chavez gets happily lost. Zito catches glimpses of him, partial between the racks and aisles, cutting neat swings with each wooden bat. Zito sees the smooth torque of his hips and it makes his breath fall short.

Zito’s equilibrium is shot and he stumbles, knocks over several boxes of baseballs. They crash and spill open, dozens of white balls rolling across the gray concrete floor. He feels for a moment like crying, pressing his fists against his eyes.

He takes off before anyone can see what he’s done. Sitting on the curb, the sun is flat and treacherous, bleeding through the palm trees.

*

Practice is no better the second day.

Beane makes them run sprints across the outfield until Zito’s heart feels dense as a chunk of heated lead. Two of the juniors throw up behind the bleachers and only one staggers back onto the field afterwards.

Munson is on his knees behind home plate, firing throw after throw down to second base. Sweat runs wildly down his face, soaking his shirt under the straps of his chest protector. The heel of Chavez’s hand is already torn open, blood on the side of his neck and Zito is kinda unsettled by the sight of it.

Beane asks him sharply, “Do you throw anything except that fucking curve?”

Zito’s mouth opens, but he can’t think of anything to say. He’s never really needed to throw anything else. He looks down at the ball in his hand, brown-scuffed, stitches like teeth.

“Here.” Beane takes hold of Zito’s wrist and Zito swallows hard. Beane turns the ball and sets Zito’s fingers in a four-seam grip. Zito is fascinated by the crosshatch of Beane’s fingers across his own. “Do that for the rest of the day. Just that. Just throw straight.”

He steps away and Zito stares at him in confusion, compact planes of Beane’s face, the bite of his eyebrows into his temples and the ragged dark hair into which Zito had imagined pushing his hand last night. Last night was a long time ago, though.

Beane almost smiles, eyes clean. “Go ahead, deuce,” he says, and Zito isn’t the kind of guy who disobeys direct orders.

He throws fastballs for hours. Everything narrows down to the black of the plate and Beane near to him, telling him over the top, telling him let your wrist go, shocking Zito by touching his hip briefly, telling him this is where you should end.

Everything’s in motion.

Munson sprawls on the dugout bench when the sun finally goes down, his chest juddering. Chavez collapses on the steps, his arms folded under his head, infield dirt ground into his hands and across his chin. Zito feels like he could lift them both up and carry them to the car without pain.

He looks back and sees Beane leaning on the fence, in the rising yellow light from the parking lot. Beane’s scribbling in a little spiral-bound notebook, his head resting on the chainlink and Zito can almost make out his hair woven through the metal.

*

They go over to Zito’s house, stumbling and holding each other up on the walk. The streetlights fall gold-soft all over them, and Munson is saying unintelligible things against Zito’s shoulder. Chavez is checking the sky for summer constellations, something that points north.

Zito’s dad is at the kitchen table when they come in, and Zito is thankful that they have not yet smoked the jay that is tucked behind his ear, hidden in his hair. He’s never been very good at acting sober in front of his parents.

“Hi, Joe,” Chavez says. Zito dumps Munson into a chair and winces, feeling his back strain.

“Hey, Dad.”

Zito’s dad smiles at them, newsprint on the side of his hand. “Evening, Erics, Barry.”

Zito hasn’t seen him since last Thursday night. Another thirty-six hour Friday and Saturday spent sleeping off the night on Eric Munson’s floor, Sunday at the beach, the party in Monterey Park and school, hospital parking lots and running sprints under Billy Beane’s watchful glare, roads half out into the desert, coming home past midnight, anxious and stoned. His father has new lines around his eyes, looking tired.

Munson has his arms folded on the table and his head burrowed, flicker of dirty brown hair on his forearms.

“How’s the team?” Joe asks.

Chavez groans theatrically and thomps Munson on the back. Munson makes a discontented noise into the crooks of his elbows. Zito rolls his eyes.

“It’s all right. We got a new coach, you know? He’s working us pretty hard.”

Joe nods, standing to wash out his coffee cup. “You’ll be all right. Always are. You want something to eat? I can make some sandwiches.”

Zito looks over at Chavez and they have a quick conversation with their eyes. “That’s okay, man. We went to In-N-Out on the way home.”

“You shouldn’t eat that stuff in season. Eric, tell him he shouldn’t eat that stuff in season.”

Chavez grins, his hand hooked in the back of Munson’s shirt. “Barry, listen to your dad.”

Zito rolls his eyes again, and Joe yawns. “Well, I’m going to bed,” Joe tells them, half-smile on his mouth, happy to have them here. “You think you’ll make it home for dinner tomorrow?”

Zito shrugs. “Maybe.”

“I’ll come, Joe,” Munson says, muffled. “Are you making lasagna?”

Joe laughs, and Munson lifts his head momentarily to grin at him. Joe puts his hand on Zito’s shoulder and pulls him down to kiss the side of his head. “Don’t stay up too late, boys.”

He claps both Erics on the back and then he disappears down the hall. Zito raids the cabinets for sugared cereal and potato chips, Chavez stealing three beers and Munson the comics section of the newspaper. They shuffle across the charred grass to the garage, which is set apart from the house and has been converted into a den.

It’s a little while after that, when they’re in the skinny alley between the fences, smoking the jay, and Zito is watching the moonlight cast the shadows of the power lines on Chavez’s face, that it occurs to him that his dad was waiting up, making sure he got home safe, and that strikes Zito so hard he takes a hit that feels like static electricity in his lungs.

*

Tonight, the thermos is full of Kool-Aid and vodka. Chavez’s mouth is stained red, dark in the cracks between his teeth. Munson keeps throwing baseballs at the wall. They watch fuzzy local television and the washing machine clicks and thrums.

Drunk, Zito touches Chavez’s back over and over again, pushes his hand down the length of it. Watches as Chavez presses his teeth into his lower lip and looks back at him through slit eyes. Munson is staring at the ceiling, talking about Billy Beane.

There are cats fighting in the street.

Munson passes out first, down fast fast fast with his face on his glove, curled up on the floor. Chavez is listing to one side on the couch, blinking slow and confused at the television. Zito stands and the room swims. He makes it to the wall and turns off the lights, makes it back to the couch and breaks into pieces, folding knees hips stomach shoulders. The television is like a lunar eclipse, guttering blue on Munson’s body, on Eric Chavez’s throat.

Zito closes his eyes.

Senior year, hold steady. Chavez hiccupping quietly, a rhythm of pain in Zito’s left arm, three inches left in the thermos if he needs it, if he can’t get to sleep on his own.

Some amount of time passes, and Zito resurfaces to a hand on his stomach. He can feel the scar on Chavez’s palm through his shirt. He rolls his head to the side and tries to open his eyes, tries to say, wait, not here. Tries to say, let’s go outside, the alley where all their best sins are committed.

But Chavez pushes his fingers into Zito’s mouth and unbuttons his jeans. Chavez hiccups against his neck and kisses his chin, palming Zito through his boxers and his fingers taste like Kix and leather.

*

Zito has been like this forever.

There is a rough catch in his voice and sometimes his hands open without instruction. Boys with blue eyes make his blood run cold. Boys with broad shoulders and long fingers make him drop to his knees. He likes hipbones like wings and bladed elbows and the diagonal trench where stomach and leg meet. He wants weight on his back and a fist on the nape of his neck, a black sky outside and a rollerskate under his face.

For a little while, he had Eric Chavez and it wasn’t weird then, just something else they did like putting glue in Munson’s hair or cutting fifth period. His one-half best friend, who didn’t seem to mind Zito’s hand down his pants or Zito’s mouth on his throat. Eric Chavez, who was the first person who ever kissed Zito back. Eric Chavez, who Zito pretends he doesn’t still miss.

It didn’t last, though not for the reasons that Chavez claimed. Chavez bloodied Zito’s lip and told him to fucking stop it, wide panicked eyes and Zito licked the blood off, good familiar taste in his mouth. Chavez said, “I don’t like it,” but he trembled sometimes when Zito dug his fingers into the hollows of his hips, and anyway, Zito could see the way he looked at Eric Munson. He knows they’ve each got the same scar on their palms.

That was sophomore year. Now, Zito fucks around with different guys, at house parties, in locker rooms, in the dugout in the middle of the night. He’s high or drunk for most of it, and Chavez forgets sometimes, and they backslide quick and messy in the front seat of the car, on the couch with Munson asleep on the floor, but usually only when they’re too fucked up to remember it in the morning.

*

The first thing Billy always does is run them.

They toe the first base line, knocking shoulders, coughing. Crossing in front of them on the grass, Beane takes a count, and then he shouts, go! and they take off for the fence.

Back and forth like pong, to the fence, to the line, over the grass and through the dirt, onto the gravel of the warning track. They slap their hands on the wood and catch sight of each other’s flushed hard-breathing faces as they jerk one hundred and eighty degrees around.

Then the infielders go one way, the outfielders another, the pitchers and catchers a third. Zito sticks close to Munson, holding his mask for him while Munson fastens his leg guards. Beane is talking about release points and deception and he says, fuck velocity, over and over like a mantra. Zito is trying not to look at him too long, still catching his breath.

He picks splinters out of his palm with his teeth. Chavez hasn’t looked at him all day long, staring out the window from the backseat of the car on the way in, leaving them to wait for him at lunchtime until Munson sighed and said, I guess he’s not coming.

Zito has thrown more pitches to Eric Munson than anyone else in the world; it’s something he could do and has done while asleep.

Beane stays with the pitchers for a little too long. Zito is second-day stoned, seven-hundred-and-thirty-sixth-day stoned, his short-term memory wrecked beyond measure, and he’s asking Beane all sorts of stupid questions, stuff he learned from Randy Jones five years ago. What about this arm angle, what about pitching out of the stretch, what about change of speed?

Beane spits on the ground and answers in single syllables. Arm buzzing warm, Zito is throwing on a string. There is a smear of brown grit on Munson’s forehead when he takes his mask off to wipe the sweat out of his eyes. Billy Beane’s hair has dampened to black, several days’ unshaven and Zito bites his lip.

As the sun is going down, Beane gathers them up and they drop cross-legged and half-bent in short left. Chavez is rubbing his thumb hard into the palm of his hand and his forearm, not meeting Zito’s eyes.

Zito thinks maybe something happened last night, but he can’t quite place it. Cherry Kool-Aid and blue light. Hard skin on his tongue. He has dreams like that sometimes.

Beane asks them how they’re feeling, but it’s clear he doesn’t really care. He paces back and forth before them, talking fast about strategy and perspective, outlining plans for the season that make little sense. They’re too worn down to concentrate, and also scared, kids in the grass.

Zito is watching the places where Beane has sweat through his shirt, his shoulders and across his stomach.

He keeps them for too long, and as they straggle back towards the gym, Zito hears someone muttering, “Why the fuck should we listen to him, he never batted his fucking weight in the bigs.”

It’s strange, almost like Billy Beane’s failure is a personal betrayal of each of them. Zito can’t think about it too much.

Chavez takes Munson quickly away, still wet from the shower, without checking in with Zito. Zito is abandoned, but it won’t last. It’s only Chavez, handling things badly again. He packs up slow and is the last one out.

He remembers too late that they came in together in Munson’s car this morning. It’s three miles to his house and his legs are already shaking.

Ashy bruise-colored sky, sallow parking lot lights, and Beane is at his car, hauling canvas bags of baseballs and sheaths of bats into the trunk. Zito only wants to go home and carve out an apple because his blue glassy is still in Chavez’s glove compartment, fall asleep on the couch and maybe have a good dream, but Beane is kinda undeniable.

“Hey.”

Beane looks up at him, the light falling atop his head and casting his eyes deep into shadow. “Deuce. Where’re your boys?”

Zito shrugs. “Took off already.” Stupid Eric Chavez blaming him for his dreams, as if Zito’s got a choice.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you without one of them around.”

“Yeah, well. They’re my best friends.”

“You know, ‘best’ can only refer to one thing. It’s in the definition.”

Zito gives him a suspicious look. Beane makes the little tight-mouthed smile that Zito is starting to recognize as the most he can offer.

“Well.” He pushes his hands into his pockets, unnerved by Beane scruffing a hand through his hair and making dust rise. “I should get going.”

Beane glances in the direction of Zito’s gaze, empty parking lot and a stand of trees at the periphery. “You’re walking?” Zito nods. Beane looks at his car, looks at Zito, looks back at his car. “I’ll give you a ride.”

It catches Zito off-guard, his hand tightening on the strap of his backpack. But Beane doesn’t seem to recognize no as a possible answer, walking around to the front of the car and getting in, leaning across the seat to pull up the passenger side lock.

Zito misses the handle twice, depth perception gone. He curses himself as he settles in the seat, his knees chocked up against the glove compartment.

“Pull that thing on the side of the seat, and it’ll move back,” Beane tells him, distracted. “You’re taller than most people I know.”

“You too,” Zito says idiotically. He moves the seat back and is thankful for the dark, no way for Beane to tell he’s blushing.

He’s sure that this has got to be against the rules, though, like most recreational criminals, Zito has always considered breaking the rules reason enough.

Beane’s car was once shiny and new and cost a chunk of his first-round signing bonus, but that was fifteen years ago. Now there are black grease marks on the dashboard and doors, and the automatic locks don’t work. Zito is pretty sure the floor didn’t start out this odd orangey-brown color.

The road is drunk down under the headlights, and the speaker on Zito’s side is broken, so the music from the radio, punk rock from the college station, sounds lopsided. He tries to lounge coolly in the shotgun seat, his knee resting against the door, but he’s chewing compulsively on his thumbnail and hating the fact that he’s sober.

“So. How was school?” Beane asks, looking vaguely disgusted with himself even as the question breaks the silence.

“Dude.” Zito rolls his eyes. “Like you really care.”

Beane almost smiles again. Zito thinks of it as being deprived of something vital, like air or water, to the extent that even the smallest concessions take on wild proportions. If he ever makes Beane laugh, he’s afraid his head might explode.

“Then tell me. How much do the guys hate me?”

Zito glances at him, but Beane’s watching the road, driving with one wrist. He looks ten years younger in the shuffle of the streetlamps, behind the wheel of a car that’s essentially secondhand.

“What am I, your spy now?”

“Just curious, deuce.”

Zito wonders at his new nickname, and moves his shoulders against the seat. “Nobody hates you,” he lies. Beane picks up on it immediately and snorts. Zito amends, “It’s just, we didn’t practice this much last year and we were still good.”

“Sometimes being good’s not enough.” The muscle in Beane’s jaw clenches abruptly like he hadn’t mean to say that. Zito wants to put his fingers there and feel the shift. He’s all kinds of wrong, tonight.

“Well,” Zito says. “I don’t really mind. And I don’t think most of them will either, after they get used to it. Half the team’s hoping to get drafted, so, you know. It’s good to be prepared, and stuff.”

The houses and scrub brush at the side of the road fly past like moths; Beane’s going almost double the speed limit and that doesn’t surprise Zito at all.

“You don’t want to go to college?”

“Depends on the draft.”

Zito doesn’t expect Beane to give him the standard education-first-baseball-later speech that he’s been hearing all his life. Zito can fully picture Billy Beane in his seventeen year old incarnation, longer hair brackish around his face, the lines gone from around his mouth and eyes. Lit up like a torch the day he signed his first major league contract, the moment when the world was small enough to fit in his pocket.

Zito fists his hands on his legs, smearing blood from his torn thumb on his jeans.

Beane mutters something that Zito doesn’t catch. “What?”

“I said you’re a stupid fucking kid just like every other stupid fucking kid who thinks that major league baseball is the only good reason for existing.”

Shocked, Zito doesn’t respond. Beane punches the wheel, his mouth twisted. “Fuck. Sorry. _Fuck_.”

Zito stares out the window, digging his nail into the palm of his hand. His face is hot and the air between them is overly thick. Beane is something like lightning under skin, all errors and insincere apology, anger vivid and real and bruised on his knuckles. Zito has spent years detaching himself in every available way, but he’s clear now and Beane is making heat curl in his stomach.

He refocuses. “Turn right at this light here,” he says quietly. Beane exhales loudly. They ride for a while, the silence only interrupted by Zito’s directions.

On Zito’s shadowy street, his house with the gold lights looking miles away from the street, Beane puts the car into park and tightens his hands on the wheel.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” Beane tells him, eyes fixed straight ahead. Zito finds himself distracted by the way Beane’s face is made up of differing shades of darkness. “It’s fine for you to want to get drafted. Like I can even fucking talk.”

“Yeah.” He’s not really listening. He wonders what Beane would do if he hooked a hand in his collar. If he pressed his thumb into the hollow under Beane’s ear, or licked the drawn-tight tendons in his arms, or skipped right to his forehead on Beane’s thigh, his teeth on the button of Beane’s jeans.

“Hey.”

Zito looks up and he’s been caught staring and there’s something new and startled in Beane’s eyes. Zito swallows and says fast, “It’s okay, Billy. You’re probably right anyway. Stupid fucking kid, me in a nutshell.” He tries to smile.

Beane shakes his head, licking his lips unconsciously. “I was the stupidest kid of all the stupid fucking kids, that’s all. So maybe I don’t want you to turn out the same way.”

Nodding, Zito clutches at the door handle, sure path of escape if he wants to take it, though he’s not certain that he actually does. The headlights are refractive and sheer on the pavement, and they’re here in the front seat of the car like Zito has been here a million times before.

“You should go,” Beane tells him, his voice strange and flat. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Zito looks at his house and it seems impossible, too clean and well-remembered. He can’t think of anything to say, no easy finish, his heart tachycardic and frightened by what the angle of Beane’s wrist is doing to him.

“Thanks. For the ride, thanks.”

Beane tips his chin, not looking at him. Zito gets out, grease and dirt and blood on his hands, and stands in the driveway watching Billy Beane’s taillights recede to nickels, match-heads, pushpin holes and then gone.

*

On Sunday, their one day off, Chavez shows up chucking little stones at Zito’s bedroom window and that means he’s been forgiven.

Munson is in the backyard, whacking rocks with a stick. Zito puts on yesterday’s jeans and a fresh shirt, smooths his hair down with water and doesn’t bother leaving a note. They spend the day at six stories, the parking garage downtown that is always abandoned on top, and the frayed edges of Zito’s mind are worn away, playing catch across the faded gray concrete, so stoned the ball looks like part of the sky, whirring down towards him.

They go to Long Beach that night, long drive with the sun going down on their left side. Munson has brought candy bars and blow-pops, and Chavez’s tongue turns blue.

The party has spilled out onto the beach by the time they get there. Zito drinks steadily, stray thoughts in his mind screwing up his equilibrium and better judgment. There’s a kid with buzzed hair and pale gray eyes, who leads Zito under the wooden deck and they jerk each other off on the sand, huge pound of feet over their heads like thunder.

Zito stumbles out and Munson finds him, laughing, pulling at his shirt, teasing him about the boy, Zito’s swollen mouth. Munson lights a jay and suddenly they’re magnetic. The moon is low on the ocean and Zito is thinking about Beane punching the steering wheel, baring his teeth.

He sleeps in the back of the car on the four a.m. drive home, his dreams fractured by Munson and Chavez talking quietly in the front seat.

*

Beane acknowledges nothing.

Zito’s just another guy on the team, someone Billy runs and watches pitch and barks at when the ball stays up. Beane doesn’t look at him any differently and doesn’t soften his voice or anything. Zito thinks maybe all it really was, was a ride home.

He acts up. He tackles Munson, and shouts from the bullpen cage at Chavez practicing with the infielders, and throws sidearm just for the hell of it, distracting everyone within earshot.

His elbow is aching and his jaw is sore from smiling, when Beane stalks over and tells him quietly to get the fuck off the field.

Zito takes off his cap and pushes a hand through his damp hair. Munson comes to stand next to him, watching Beane walk away, straight line of his back like a ruler.

“What’s going on, man?” Munson asks him. Zito shakes his head helplessly. “You can’t fuck around with a guy like that.”

Zito’s throat tightens, darting a guilty look at Munson, but it’s only a figure of speech.

“I think there’s something in that new shit we’ve been smoking,” Zito says. “It’s making me all. Crazy.”

This is, at least, partly true.

Munson snorts, pulling the laces on his glove with his teeth. “But not me and Chavvy, huh? That’s some real specific bonus we got.” He pauses. “You better go. He looked like he wanted to kill you.”

Zito looks over to where Beane is standing behind second base, his arms crossed on his chest. Chavez turns a neat double play and Beane says something uncomplimentary about his footwork, and Chavez nods, sweat dripping off his face.

Zito leaves, and is surprised when he gets to the locker room and whips his glove as hard as he can into the wall.

He sits down on the bench, his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. His spikes tick-tap on the cement and everything else is so quiet; he can hear the drip of the busted shower.

He can hear footsteps approach, growing louder and louder until they’re right on top of him, and he can taste copper.

“What the fuck is your problem?”

Pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes as hard as he can, Zito breathes out slowly. “I’m fine. I’m sorry. Just fucking around. I don’t know. Sorry, Billy, okay?”

Nothing for a moment, drip from the showers, Zito’s breath against the insides of his wrists.

“Does this happen a lot?” Beane asks, dangerously low. “Because we’ve got two weeks before the games start, and I don’t have a whole lot of fucking time to deal with this crap.”

Zito thinks about the kid in the garage that morning, not quite remembering his name, just the black hair like knife cuts in front of his eyes, and the kid under the deck in Long Beach, with the tough hands and the light in inch-wide strips between the boards. He tries to remember why they thought it was a good idea to smoke before practice today, whether or not their pot is laced, because his lungs are working at half-capacity, his head is foggy and everything is fucked up. He thinks for just a second about Eric Chavez.

He takes his hands down and looks at Beane’s feet for awhile.

“It happens sometimes,” he admits. “Not, not usually on the field. Today was just. Weird.”

“It better be weird as in never gonna happen again, understand?”

Beane is still angry, and that ticks Zito off a little bit, because at least some of this is his fault. He looks up and it turns out to be a bad idea. Beane is glaring at him, violence clearly evident in the hold of his shoulders and the line of his jaw, and Zito remembers apocryphal stories about Beane destroying things as a teenager after his rare moments of disgrace, aluminum bats at ninety degree angles, dented walls and shattered stereos.

It flashes through Zito like hard liquor. What Beane could do to him if his control gave out just a little bit more.

“Billy,” he says hoarsely, his eyes huge.

Beane goes still. His face freezes and his arms tense and he stares down at Zito. Zito thinks maybe they’re close, maybe this would be a different kind of damage than usual.

He drops to his knees on the concrete. Beane makes a bizarre sound, his hands in fists under his elbows and Zito can’t think of what Beane’s eyes look like, can’t imagine anything darker, and he has lived beneath a desert sky his whole life.

Zito’s not thinking about anything, really. He can’t spare his focus for anything beyond the physical, only reaching up and latching his hand onto Beane’s belt and starting to tug him forward, wetting his lips.

And one of Beane’s fisted hands comes flying out from the side and clocks Zito across his cheekbone and Zito falls down. It wasn’t even that hard, more shock than anything else, and Zito’s hands are flat on the locker room floor.

“Don’t, jesus, don’t _do_ that, man,” Beane tells him, sounding purely stunned and even a little bit confused, which Zito thinks he can count as a victory.

Or he will, once he can get himself off the fucking floor.

*

Out in Munson’s backyard, lying under the old swingset, Zito is expecting lightning and feeling the grass move beneath his head. His fingertips are singed. He’s doing what he can to put his life in order.

He plays for the best high school baseball team in the country and he wants to sleep with his coach and he lives in fear of what the morning might show him.

Chavez arrives like a constellation given breath and depth, and sits on the swing. The chain is rusted and whines low. A fresh joint burns between Chavez’s fingers, and he pushes his heels on the grass. Zito remembers when the grass used to be worn away in oblong runway patches under the swings, back when he first started hanging out with Munson and Chavez, when they’d still swing occasionally.

“Where’s Munce?” Zito asks. Chavez shrugs, drawing on the jay. Munson is probably asleep in the backyard somewhere, hidden in the dark. They’ll have to find him before the sun comes up.

“So Billy said something about me maybe playing first when I’m not pitching,” Zito says. Chavez squints down at him, but doesn’t answer. “Because, like, tall and left-handed? Or something? Lemme get a hit of that.”

Chavez hands the joint down to him and Zito blows across the tip of it to stem the cherry a bit so he won’t ash in his eye or anything. Zito thinks it’s pretty remarkable that Beane wants him to be a first baseman, when he has been nothing but a pitcher since he was seven years old, but Chavez doesn’t seem to find it very interesting.

“Are you okay, Chav?”

Sort of angling his head to the side, Chavez smiles a little bit. Feral clouds overhead and Zito doesn’t know why he keeps picturing star formations and supernovas. He can’t even see the moon. Chavez’s swing is moving very slowly, back and forth like a twice-shot heartbeat.

“Billy?” Chavez asks quietly.

Zito blinks at the joint in his hand, the spot of orange illuminating the torn sides of his fingers. “What about him?”

Chavez sighs, looking up at the sky. Zito stares at the revealed length of his throat, the way Chavez looks like a statue from below.

“I’m fucked up,” Chavez tells him.

“What else is new?”

“Shut up, please.” Chavez reaches down and his hand ghosts across Zito’s cheek before he changes course and retrieves the joint. “Disregarding the fact that I’m fucked up and that I obviously have more invested in you than most other people, I need to ask, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

It’s a good question and probably a fair one, and nothing that should make Zito’s throat close up like this. He doesn’t know how Chavez knows, maybe just osmosis from the five years that they’ve lived hand to mouth and in each other’s pockets all the time. Maybe they share certain brain chemicals, low-level telepathy like how they always know when the other is hungry, and how the three of them always end up on the front lawn together, ready to leave without having to talk about it.

Like how Munson is aware that Zito fucks around with guys, figured it out long before Zito did, apparently. Zito never told him, it just sort of occurred that, yes, Munson knows. Munson is okay with it.

Not everything transfers, though. Munson still doesn’t know about Chavez, because Chavez thinks that telling him that one thing would mean he has to tell the rest, too.

The vague float of Chavez above him is making him dizzy, so he closes his hand on Chavez’s ankle and holds him still. Smooth bones under thin skin and Chavez’s feet must be dirty or at least grass-stained.

“I’m just. I’m thinking about something different.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know.” Zito feels his eyes burn suddenly. He’s too stoned for this, caught on the edge where everything is profound and music sounds better. “I thought. I’m allowed to do what I want, right? You, you’re not mad at me?”

Chavez half-scoffs and Zito grins, a tear snaking out the corner of his eye. It’s not that, can’t be, because Chavez never had that kind of hold over him even when they were sophomores. Zito hadn’t even wanted to look at other guys when they were sophomores, when his life revolved around movie moments and riding into the hills and finding new and exciting places to go down on Eric Chavez, but anyway, it was only four months and even if Zito suspects sometimes that he had been deeply in love with Chavez, they’d never gotten far enough to say, just you.

Chavez slides out of the swing and leaves it twisting and shivering. He sits cross-legged next to Zito and carefully puts the jay between Zito’s lips, steady as Zito inhales. Zito doesn’t have to move, his lungs doing all the work. Fog laid over cobwebs laid over cotton and Zito is barely even here anymore.

“Not mad at you. Love you.” Chavez takes the jay away and pushes his fingers across Zito’s mouth. Zito licks reflexively, thinking it’s strange that their thoughts move in such similar patterns. Chavez looks so sad. “But you know Beane is the stupidest idea ever. You’ve got to know that.”

Zito closes his eyes tightly. Nobody knows what went wrong with Billy Beane, the cause of the fragmented six years he’d spent in the majors that didn’t even add up to one full season, but Zito thinks he can see it sometimes. Sometimes he wants to write names and dates on the shower-steamed bathroom mirror, and sometimes he viscerally understands the gap between talent and heart, and sometimes it seems like a loss of the worst kind to have to throw a straight pitch.

“I’m sorry, Ricky,” he says, though he’s not sure if he’s done anything wrong except get on his knees for Beane.

Chavez’s curled hand touches the hinge of his jaw, and Chavez opens Zito’s mouth with his own, breathes rough smoke into his lungs. He pulls back and stays for a moment so close that Zito can’t really tell them apart. Zito wants to hold the back of Chavez’s neck and make him promise not to freak out tomorrow, because he’s not gonna fuck around with Chavez tonight and he shouldn’t have to suffer for the stuff that’s only happening under the surface.

He falls asleep to Chavez’s breath on his face, Chavez whispering, “So stupid, don’t you know, can’t you see.”

*

They meet behind the gym at lunch and usually they go out to one of their cars to smoke a joint and talk about the morning. The days are getting longer and Chavez is visibly distressed, hanging on Zito, pushing his face into Munson’s shoulder.

Zito’s parents have taken to leaving him notes under the windshield wiper like parking tickets. One night, or morning, really, coming home to take a shower and change clothes, it strikes him that he can’t remember which seat at the dining room table is his. It’s maybe the worst thing that’s happened to him this year.

He sleeps in Munson’s backyard and Chavez’s attic. Sometimes on the baseball field, woken up by sprinklers at six in the morning. There are scouts at practice occasionally, burnt-looking men with notebooks and radar guns in black briefcases.

Their first game is in a week. The 1996 amateur draft is in four months.

Billy Beane looks at him on the field, pinched frustrated look like he can tell how out of place Zito is playing first base. But it was Beane’s idea, and Zito gets mad at Chavez for throwing in the dirt, afraid of the runner barreling down the line. He doesn’t want to look back at Billy, wants with amazing strength for this to be over and behind him, but Beane’s the one with ghosts and Zito’s the one with his life still ahead of him.

*

Zito fucks up and passes out in the middle of his Greek Mythology class. He’d still been drunk when he came to school, hadn’t slept the night before, and Munson triple-dog-dared him to finish what was left in the thermos, out in the hallway before they split up.

Last straw, and something about feet with wings, sprung fully grown from his forehead, and he collapses in the slender aisle between the desks, taking a hurricane of white paper down with him. He wakes up in the nurse’s office, reeking of whiskey.

There’s a cold compress wrapped in a washcloth on his forehead and the brightly colored posters showing the food pyramid make his head hurt. The nurse is silver-haired and tells him tiredly, you’re in some serious trouble, son.

They’d carried him all the way across campus, three guys from his Greek Mythology class who spread the story relentlessly at the break, and Zito keeps almost falling asleep. His eyes feel like stones, his arms dense and a hundred miles long. The principal appears, frothing and satyr-like, so disappointed in you, you’ve got so much going for you, wasting your life, who bought you the liquor?

Zito keeps his eyes closed and mumbles something about a Latino guy behind the Safeway. Same alibi for weed, same for anything else they aren’t supposed to have, and as always, it immediately stems the questions.

Munson shows up, panicked, and Zito can hear him shouting in the outer office, “He’s sick! He’s got the flu!” but Munson sounds drunk as fuck himself, and it’s almost funny.

Chavez is close behind, hauling Munson out of there before they all have to take Breathalyzers. They appear in the window next to Zito’s bed, Chavez’s dark fearsome eyes and Munson’s confusion, the green behind them. Munson puts his fist up on the glass and Zito flattens his hand on the same spot. Munson mouths, i’m sorry, barry, sorry, and Zito waves it away grandly, attempting to smile.

He takes a handful of condoms from the plastic fishbowl, and some of the chewy orange vitamin C candies that taste too good to be genuinely healthy. He’s still drunk and not really processing anything. The school is unable to locate his parents, and they’re talking about whether to bring the police into it.

Then Beane’s voice, cut like a knife, like a moment of lucidity in the middle of an acid trip:

“You will _not_ call the cops.”

Zito blinks up at the ceiling, fingering the condoms in his pocket.

“I don’t care. The season starts on Friday and he’s gonna be pitching. And he’s not gonna be doing it with a fucking juvenile record.” A pause, a rumble of the principal’s voice, and then Beane again. “No, I don’t talk like that in front of the kids.” Beane coughs.

Zito scrubs at his face with the washcloth. He discovers a sore spot on the edge of his forehead, must have hit his head on the way down. There are cartoon vegetables on the food pyramid poster with big happy smiles and white-gloved hands.

Beane says, “I don’t think I need to tell you how much the team means to this school. That boy in there is kinda crucial to what we’re trying to do this year.”

Biting his lip, Zito looks down at his hands, the washcloth wrung between them. He feels sick, like maybe Munson was right about the flu, maybe he can see the future.

“I’ll take care of him,” Beane tells the principal. “Give me five minutes with him and I’ll straighten him out. Nobody’s more pissed off about this than me, and trust me, I can make the lesson fuh—I can make it stick.”

Zito glares at the food pyramid poster. He doesn’t want to get straightened out. He doesn’t want things to stick.

Beane appears in the doorway and Zito’s wind is knocked out of him, Beane with killer eyes and hard mouth and just fucking radiating rage.

“Get the fuck up,” he says under his breath, because Beane doesn’t talk like that in front of the kids. And it fits, because Beane’s so angry.

Zito stands and tries to sneer but it doesn’t work. His backpack is by the door, near where Beane is standing, carried across campus by some guy that Zito doesn’t know, just like Zito himself. When he bends to get it, the world reels and he pitches forward. Beane grabs his shoulder and hauls him upright.

“All right?” Beane asks, almost like real concern, steel colors at the corners of his eyes.

Zito shakes his head and trembles. He wants to fall onto Beane and not be blamed for anything that his body might do. He wants Beane’s arm around his waist, carried out of here. He can taste orange bright like a sun in his mouth, a sure awareness that he won’t be able to do this much longer.

But he gets his balance back and keeps his head down. Drunk and seventeen years old, he fixes his gaze on the back of Beane’s neck and follows him out of the office, past the principal and the nurse and the kids who came for aspirin and band-aids.

Beane takes him to his car and Zito slides into the passenger’s seat, moving the seat back without thinking about it. They don’t speak as they leave the school, Zito staring out the window, Beane driving fast again. They go through a McDonald’s drive-thru and Beane orders two coffees, asks twice for more sugar. He pulls into the parking lot, handing Zito one of the paper cups.

“I don’t, um. Don’t really like coffee,” Zito says.

“Drink it. Sober the fuck up.”

Zito pours in seven packets of sugar, and has to steady the cup with his other hand because he’s still shaking. He burns the roof of his mouth so bad he can almost feel it blistering. They’re quiet for awhile, watching the palm trees move in the wind.

“So,” Beane says eventually, his face angled away from Zito. “I notice you came to school fucking drunk today.”

Zito swallows coffee and sugar and orange. His throat feels gritty. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Somebody spiked your orange juice or something? Christ.” Beane puts his coffee in the cup holder and his fists lock against the steering wheel. He’s holding himself back, Zito realizes, and Zito can see how uncharacteristic this past month has been for Beane, profanity and near-violence aside.

“Why’d you come back to San Diego?” Zito asks without thinking.

“Oh, nice fucking try, deuce. No changing the subject. Tell me, are you actually this fucked up or is this some idiotic teenage rebellion?”

“I’m actually this fucked up.”

Beane stops, and looks over at him. Zito looks back, wide-eyed and scared, scared all the time these days. He shrugs kinda helplessly.

Beane drinks his coffee, uncurling his fist to tap his fingers on the wheel. “Well, what are we gonna do about that?”

Zito thinks, wanting to find a good answer for him. It’s been so long now, life revolving around eighths and lighters and Munson’s camping thermos. He wonders how Chavez and Munson have managed to keep their shit together, but that’s a stupid line of thought and he abandons it quickly. He thinks about how fucking bored he gets whenever he’s sober.

“I’ll stop drinking so much,” he offers lamely.

“Great. Problem solved.”

“The fuck do you want me to say?” Zito presses his teeth into his lip, takes a breath. “I mean. What do you think I should do?”

“Fuck.” Beane glances at him, strange wounded look. “I don’t know. Be something you’re not, I guess.”

Zito stares at his coffee. “I. I could try that.”

“No. Jesus, this isn’t like. Look. It’s not, like, I say something and then it must be right. I can’t tell you how to act or what to be or anything. It’s not my responsibility. You’re not my responsibility.”

Stung, Zito curls his lip and says, “You’re the one who brought me out here. Told the principal you’d take care of me.”

“That doesn’t mean I know what you should do to fix your fucking life. Did it ever occur to you that maybe I’m not the guy you should look to for advice about being happy and well-adjusted and shit?”

Beane exhales sharply, looking away again. Zito thinks maybe Beane speaks without thinking, bad habit.

He continues, measured and careful, “I brought you out here to sober you up. Because we’ve got practice in a couple of hours and one thing the scouts really don’t think too highly of is when fucking underage ace pitchers show up lit.”

Zito finishes his coffee, the back of his mouth strafed and tender. He picks at the paper edge, thinking about first grade and being asked to draw a picture of what they’d be when they grew up. Be a majer leeg picher and make a millon dollers. His dad had had it framed.

He thinks about Beane for a minute, feeling rhythmless and cold.

“Billy, I think maybe. Maybe I’m not cut out for this.”

“Baseball?”

Zito shakes his head. “High school.”

Beane breathes out a laugh. “You’re gonna graduate in four months.”

“That’s. Kind of a long time, man.”

“Not really. It’s not even a full season.”

And Beane catches himself again, another thing he’d like to take back, still reckoning things by the life that he lost.

“Why did you come back here?” Zito asks again.

Beane shakes his head, his face downcast. “I’m not gonna tell you that.”

Beane had washed out of baseball at twenty-eight, disappeared for five years, and then resurrected, reoccurred on the fields and in the hallways, the place where he had once had everything. Zito wants to fill in the gaps, put together the pieces of Beane’s history so that he can be sure not to repeat it. But he can’t figure these things out on his own. He can’t just guess.

“For what it’s worth,” Zito says haltingly. “I’m glad you did. Come back here.”

Beane looks at him in surprise, and Zito’s got fresh caffeine in his bloodstream, riding the precarious edge between drunk and hungover, the overexposed morning light sheering in through the windows. Everything’s fucked up and nothing seems real, so Zito puts his hand on Beane’s rough-warm face and leans across the space, fits their mouths together.

Their teeth clack, and Beane grabs Zito’s arm as if he’s gonna throw him off. Zito doesn’t think he’ll survive if that happens, so he presses in, and feels Beane bite his lower lip, but not like he wants Zito to stop. Licking at Beane’s mouth, Zito thinks this has been the weirdest day of his life and it’s not yet noon. Beane growls and kisses him back so hard.

Zito’s got one hand on the back of Beane’s neck and the other on Beane’s leg. He’s pushing up, long muscle and soft denim and Beane’s tongue is in his mouth. He lays his knuckles down over the fly and Beane almost gasps. Zito is going as fast as possible, before Beane can realize what’s happening. He’s got the button open and the zipper down and Beane is saying, “Fuck. Fuck,” every time he pulls away for a breath.

Zito opens his eyes a little bit when Beane drops his head against Zito’s neck, quick painful bites through his shirt, Beane making this odd scraping noise in the back of his throat and Zito’s hand is moving. Around the dark blur of Beane’s hair, Zito can see the street, the simple Wednesday pace of the world outside this car, where Beane is gripping Zito’s shoulder and cursing like Zito’s hand on him is a knife in his chest, twisting.

*

The parking lot of a McDonalds, Zito keeps thinking, as Beane drives him home without a word, as he erases the messages from the school from the answering machine, as he rolls himself a small joint to take the edge off the nausea, as he sits in the alley under the wide sky. The parking lot of a McDonalds.

He can’t get his mind around it. Remembering flashes, little bits like the push of Beane’s teeth against his lip and Beane’s hand wound up in his shirt. Beane’s hot forehead on his jaw, the sounds and bitter coffee taste and the gray street, sunlight and palm trees. This unbelievable thing that’s happened to him.

Zito has resolved to go inside and spend the afternoon jerking off, but Munson and Chavez show up at lunchtime and he has to regroup.

“Dude. Dude.” Munson falls next to him and hugs him around the shoulders. “I suck so bad, man.”

Chavez kicks at Zito’s feet. “C’mon, Munce, nobody made him take that last shot.”

“I _dared_ him,” Munson says, heartbroken by guilt and his hair all screwed up.

Zito looks up at Chavez. “We don’t turn down dares.”

Chavez sighs and sits down next to them, bumping his shoulder into Zito’s. “Are you okay?”

Zito shrugs, then shakes his head. Chavez is smoothing his hand across Zito’s forehead, and Munson’s arm is still around his shoulders. His best friends in the world and he’d die for them without question, and it’s terrible, his chest hurts so much.

“I did something stupid,” Zito whispers. Munson rattles him, Zito’s bracketed and he could fall in any direction and be caught.

“It’s okay,” Munson tells him. “Don’t worry, because it’s gonna be all right. Listen, we need to have a family meeting.” Munson catches Chavez’s eyes and Chavez nods. “No more drinking before school, okay? Only weed. Because, seriously, you passed out and I almost called Principal Doyle a cocksucker and it’s just, really, we gotta be more careful.”

Zito tilts into Munson, clinging to Chavez’s wrist, and says with his eyes closed, “Word.”

They’re like that for a minute, legs sprawled out in front, leaning back against the fence and each other. Zito thinks that if things could just stay like this, easy and without conflict, then he might be okay. Might survive seventeen and none of the bad parts would follow him around anymore.

“Did you get suspended?” Chavez asks eventually.

“No. Billy—Beane, he came and he talked them out of it.”

Zito flushes instinctively, remembering Beane’s mouth and slick hot skin in his hand, and he shifts uncomfortably, half-hard and it doesn’t mean anything. He’s seventeen. Looking at trees gets him hard.

“I knew it. He’s not all bad, Ricky, I told you so,” Munson says, mumbling against Zito’s shoulder. Chavez just shakes his head, his mouth thin and small. Zito places his hand on Chavez’s cheek and sighs.

Chavez and Munson cut their afternoon classes. They watch daytime talk shows and stay as clean as possible until it’s time for practice.

*

On the field, the guys rag Zito for being an incredible fuck-up, and Zito doesn’t let himself look at Beane. His hand feels branded, his mouth swollen. Self-control has never exactly been one of his strong suits.

He thinks of Beane in the car, driving him back home. Zito had kept his hand on Beane’s leg even when Beane tried to hit him away. After awhile, Beane had given up. Zito can still feel the give as Beane shifted gears, his thigh tense and then lax and then tense again. Beane hadn’t said anything and neither had Zito, and the sidewalks rolled, the sky an everlasting blue.

Chavez tells him quietly, his hands wrapped on a bat, eyeblack smeared and streaked on his cheeks, “You don’t look okay, man.”

Zito looks down at the grass. “Long day.” Fucking unending day. He keeps forgetting that he hadn’t even slept the night before. Chavez claps him on the shoulder and Zito feels better for a minute, but then he can see Beane out of the corner of his eye, shouting at the outfielders, back, back, easier to come in than go back, and Zito’s lungs contract painfully.

Beane neglects the pitchers, and Zito wonders if he’s being avoided. He knows it for sure when he joins the infielders and Beane immediately leaves for the batting cage. The temperatures are climbing. Zito’s itching right out of his skin.

As they walk back to the gym, shoulders sloped and hands dirty, Munson says something about going to the arcade, and Chavez has his thumb hooked in Zito’s belt loop. The sun is setting at their backs.

“I can’t, man,” Zito says, lying. “I’ve got to get home and figure out if my parents heard anything from the school.”

Munson and Chavez nod, good idea, take care of business. They shower and change and say good-bye in the parking lot, but Zito just lurks around in the shadows by the trees until the team has dispersed, and then heads back into the gym, down the cramped corridor to where Beane’s little office is, the yellow light burning.

Zito smooths down his damp hair with his hand, rubbing a finger quickly across his teeth. He steps into the doorway and Beane is at his desk, studying the notebook he carries, scrawling things in the margins. Bent over like this in the faded light, his elbow on the desk and his hand in his hair, he looks like any other kid at this school, studying for midterms, for the SATs, for the life ahead.

“Hey, Billy.”

Beane jerks and his head snaps up. His expression flashes briefly through panic and something else, before settling back, default blankness with his eyes very hot.

“What are you still doing here?”

Zito moves his shoulders and puts his hands in his pockets so he won’t fiddle with the hem of his shirt, won’t look quite as young as he knows he is.

“I figured I’d stop by. See you.”

Beane sits back, the chair creaking. The office is full of old green filing cabinets and ruined equipment, ripped chest protectors with the stuffing spilling out white, baseball stitches unraveled, oil and grass stains and the thick heavy scent of leather. Beane fits right in, a broken piece of the game.

“Look, kid, about this morning-”

“I want to do it again,” Zito cuts him off. He is brave, he is invincible. He needs something good to come from his youth; it might as well be this. Beane’s eyes widen a bit. “I want to do it a lot. All of it, like. Everything.”

Beane turns his eyes upwards and stares at the ceiling for a minute. Zito can see that he’s hanging on to the edge of the desk like it’s the only thing keeping him in place.

“That is not going to happen.”

“Why not?” Zito asks stupidly, and Beane laughs caustically, dropping his disbelieving gaze back down.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” He licks his lips, staring somewhere just over Zito’s shoulder. “Do you realize that what we did this morning is a fucking felony? I mean, do you get that you’re honest-to-god jailbait?”

“I’m eighteen in May,” Zito says, feeling frantic and wanting something or anything, hold him still, hold steady.

“And I’m thirty-four in March. What’s your goddamn point?” Beane snags his head to the side, snarling. “Fuck. Listen to me. This job, this team, this is, like, last fucking chance for me. You don’t know what it’s been like, it’s, it’s been five years. I have nothing left except this, and I’m not gonna fuck it up over you.”

Zito crumples against the doorframe a little bit, pressure behind his eyes. There are cracks in the industrial cream-colored linoleum, scuff marks and cleat dents. Nobody has ever wanted to risk anything for him. He’s a best friend and a one-night stand and a mistake in the parking lot of a McDonalds. Sick and tired of this shit, of being less than real and not worth the trouble.

He lifts his head, calling up the night when Chavez had hit him and lied to him, forces heat out through his eyes. Sick and tired of going down without a fight.

“All that is just circumstance. It shouldn’t matter.”

Beane laughs again, awful sound like metal scraping on stone. “Circumstance? This is my fucking life, Barry, it’s not just a timing problem. Something happens, we get caught, I lose my job and maybe go to jail and you, you get a summer’s worth of therapy to decide that you were a victim and it was just an experimental phase, and then it’s right back to college or the draft or whatever the fuck. Won’t hurt you a bit.”

Zito shakes his head angrily. “First of all, fuck you and your ‘experimental phase’ bullshit. I’m very very gay and that’s not gonna change. Second of all, you obviously remember nothing about being seventeen if you think this isn’t gonna hurt me. _Looking_ at you hurts me. And finally, you haven’t said anything about not wanting me.”

Beane just stares at him, his mouth slightly open. Zito rubs his eyes and counts to five.

“Billy,” he says carefully. “I know you’re right about most of this stuff. And I know you’re smarter than me and you’ve already lived the next fifteen years of my life, and I, I get that, okay? I’m messed up like you wouldn’t believe, man, but I know what this is.”

Beane’s eyes flicker. “What’s that?” he asks low.

Zito sighs. “Self-destruction with positive side effects. As opposed to what we got now, which is just regular self-destruction.” He tries to smile. “Since when does Billy Beane let other people tell him what to do, anyway?”

“Jesus.” Beane puts his hands up over his face. “You’re out of your fucking mind.”

“Yeah, well. Takes one to know one.”

Beane snorts a laugh, and Zito watches his shadow thrown big on the back wall, his shoulders shivering vaguely, or maybe that’s just the light. He swallows and crosses the room, walking silent on the outsides of his feet. Beane doesn’t look up until Zito is on his side of the desk, until Zito is sinking to his knees again.

Closing his hand in Zito’s hair, Beane warns him, “Don’t,” but his voice is unsteady.

Zito moves his head, feeling the tug of Beane’s hand, small wires of heat running down the back of his neck. “I’m gonna,” he answers, pulling Beane’s legs around and working his belt open. “I want to. You want me to.”

His fingers skate across the skin of Beane’s stomach and Beane breathes out sharply. “God. There’s a fucking reason you’re illegal, you’re gonna kill me.”

Zito grins, bites the inside of Beane’s knee. Beane’s grip on his hair loosens, still there, but guiding him forward now, down and in. It’s happening now, gathering low in his stomach, his mouth dry. He sucks a mark onto the place once covered by the waistband of Beane’s shorts, feels Beane’s hips jerk under his hands.

And he can hear Beane muttering and swearing, one hand in Zito’s hair and the other touching Zito’s mouth in astonishment, moving when he moves, keeping time.

*

Munson calls Zito’s line at six in the morning on Friday, the day of their first game. The telephone ringing takes form as a landmine in Zito’s dream, and he’s covered in shrapnel, filthy and bruised, agreeing to meet his friends for breakfast before school.

He sits on the grass of the front lawn, the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up. Lavender sky, the moon a half-cup and still visible over the rooftops. Chavez is asleep in the backseat of the car, covered with beach towels like they’re trying to smuggle him across the border. Baseballs roll around under Zito’s feet.

They go to the diner and have pancakes and lakes of coffee, sweetened and creamed to pale. Zito keeps saying, “Listen,” and Chavez keeps telling him, “Shut up.”

Skipping English class, not high and not drunk, not altered in any way, Zito goes down to Beane’s office and dozes with his head on Beane’s desk, papercuts spidering across his fingers and the undersides of his wrists. Beane shows up after lunch and pushes him against the closed door and kisses him as if there’s blood in Zito that he can’t live without, until Zito can’t think straight and can’t remember anything that has existed before this. Beane holds onto Zito’s belt and draws away, and then tells him to get the fuck back to class.

And that afternoon, in the floodlike desert wind, Chavez’s flyballs ride over the fence and the thinness of the air cuts channels for Zito’s curveball. They win without really trying, and Zito is watching Billy Beane.

Zito is waiting for Beane at the deaf edges of the parking lot, lighting matches one-handed, closing his eyes singularly and in sequence to make the stars move across the sky.

*

After their Saturday practice, when Beane carefully does not meet Zito’s eyes, they’re hanging out in Zito’s garage, slung like socks over the chair and couch, debating whether or not to go to a certain party being thrown out on Canyon Road by a kid they don’t know very well.

“I heard there’s gonna be kegs,” Munson says. He tosses a baseball on a long high parabola to Chavez, who’s lying down with his head near Zito’s leg.

“Excellent. It’ll be busted after an hour.” Chavez whips the ball back, savage twist of his wrist like always, making the ball duck abruptly and only Munson’s decade of practice enables him to catch it.

Zito’s head is back, face tilted towards the ceiling. Billy Beane had licked his ear and explained hoarsely about all the things he wanted to do to Zito, and Zito had come so hard he’d cracked his knee against the glove compartment, a new bruise in the same shape as the old ones.

“You’re a very negative person, Ricky.”

“Thank you, Munson.”

Chavez shifts a bit, and Zito absently slides his hand into Chavez’s black hair.

“Where’s this kid from again?” Chavez asks. From the corner of his eye, Zito can see Munson shrug, rubbing the ball between his palms. Chavez’s hair slips like water.

“Transfer. Back east, I think. Or the Midwest. Something.”

“I don’t think we should be trusting people we don’t know.”

“We don’t know anybody, dude,” Zito mumbles. Chavez tips his head to look at him, his mouth a line and Zito can never tell when his pupils are blown because his eyes are too dark.

“I’m sorry, are you a part of this conversation? Thought you were fucking asleep.”

Zito can feel his face fall, biting down on the inside of his lip. He puts his head back, wondering where Billy Beane is now, what he’s doing, what kind of stuff he has up on the walls at his house, how he fixes sandwiches, what he looks like when he’s shaving, where he puts his pocket change when he comes home, and what he thinks about when he can’t fall asleep.

Munson is telling Chavez to stop being a fucking asshole, and then they’re fighting, the terrible married-couple fights that they have rarely but that always make Zito want to put a fork in his eye.

He’s stroking Chavez’s hair without really being aware of it. They smoked a joint in the alley, dulling their already vague inhibitions, and all three of them know too much about each other. It’s way too easy to find the sore spots.

“And fuck you, Munce, because no one asked you to take fucking sides and anyway, what’re you gonna do about it-”

And then, thank god, Zito’s mom is knocking at the door. Chavez falls immediately silent. Roberta sticks her head in and smiles at them. Zito smiles back desperately.

“You boys want some dinner?”

Zito’s fingers tighten in Chavez’s hair and Chavez hisses like a slit tire. He keeps his expression bland and repeats on a loop, pay attention, pay attention.

“We’re okay, mom, thanks.”

She smooths a patch of silver hair back behind her ear. It seems impossible that she can’t feel the tension, the way Munson is clenching his teeth, her son’s hand in Eric Chavez’s hair. It keeps occurring to Zito over and over again, like getting kicked repeatedly in the ribs, that his parents really know nothing about him.

“Well, I’ll leave some in the oven in case you change your mind.” She’s still smiling and Zito’s paranoid, she must be able to see it. But she’s only half-laughing and saying, “Eric Munson, you need a haircut,” and then wishing them well, disappearing.

They’re quiet again. Zito touches Chavez’s forehead and his fine eyebrows. Chavez blinks up at him with muddy fucked-up eyes.

“Hey,” Munson says, and it’s a physical effort to look over at him. “Do you guys think I need a haircut?”

Zito looks down at Chavez, wanting some direction about how to respond, and Chavez is laughing without sound, looking like he’s about to cry.

They go to the party on Canyon Road. There are black crows on the power lines, and Munson is leaning between the seats to pass the glassy back to Zito. His face is orange-lit by the streetlamps, and Chavez is shouting at the other cars on the highway, weaving in and out.

Zito is often sure that they’ll die before they graduate, twisted metal or too much liquor, drowned in the ocean. It’s not invulnerability that makes kids like them act the way they do—it’s the exact opposite.

People are spilling out onto the lawn, red cups with white insides and long chains of colored plastic beads. Munson leans back against the car and sucks the last out of the pipe, before knocking it against the heel of his hand and tucking it in his pocket. Chavez is looking at Zito and Zito doesn’t know why.

They’re into the breach, angling with shoulders and turned hips, and the color and the noise banishes even the idea of lucidity from Zito’s mind. He knows some of these people, far from all, and there are kegs in the backyard, true enough. Munson’s already sitting in the grass, talking with a couple of underclassmen. Chavez has disappeared.

Zito meets the kid whose party it is, the transfer student from Chicago, as it turns out, and he’s very tall and so drunk he can’t speak. Zito ends up propping him against the wall, telling him semi-hysterically that when Billy Beane says his name it feels like his chest is going to explode.

The kid’s head bobs and he’s got one hand fisted in Zito’s shirt, stony knuckles, his chest hitching. His eyes are swollen and blue, his mouth this perfect thing. When it seems like he’s going to fall, Zito levers him up and walks him step-by-step down the hall, pushing open doors to reveal closets with neat-stacked towels, extra sheets, bedrooms crawling with limbs and torn clothes.

They end up in a little brother’s bedroom, Power Ranger posters on the walls, skinny twin bed under the window. The party noise drains and muffles, and Zito drops the transfer student onto the bed, tight hips and Zito’s hands sliding up under the kid’s shirt, wanting to lick his ribs. They’re moonlit.

Zito can do anything, because the kid is blacked out already, has been for hours, and he gets confused, if the memory is gone, did it really happen? So thin Zito can feel bones popping under skin. The kid’s mouth moves slowly, and Zito leans down close, hears him whispering something about can’t pitch in this heat, can’t take California anymore.

The kid passes out, and Zito sighs, rolls onto his back. There are green glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. His head is spinning and he misses Billy Beane like he’d miss his left arm.

After awhile, the door cracks open, splinter of hallway light, and then closes again, and then Chavez is saying, “Would you look at this.”

Zito flinches. “I wasn’t. Wasn’t doing anything.”

“Fuckin’ hope not. They got names for people like you.”

Sneering, Zito wishes he could lift his head. He can hear the kid breathing shallowly next to him, and he thinks about staying in here for the rest of the night, just to make sure the kid lives through the night. Chavez comes across the room and tugs the kid’s shirt down, hiding his flat stomach and the trail of gold hair, and Zito feels weirdly bereft. Chavez sits down on Zito’s other side, black-haired angel in the silver light through the window.

Zito rubs his face with his hand, distantly aware that it’s that time of the night.

“Munce found a girl,” Chavez whispers, though there’s really no reason to. The Chicago kid is closer to dead than asleep. The party is miles away. “Some fucking freshman, can you buy that?”

Chavez puts his hand on Zito’s stomach, under his shirt. His thumb itches low near Zito’s belt.

“Yeah,” Zito breathes out, concentrating on Chavez’s hand, squeezing his eyes shut and it’s no good, he can see everything.

“So I said, like, dude, she’s fourteen,” scrape of his palm in an arch above Zito’s belly button, “and he’s all, she’s a very mature fourteen.” Chavez starts unbuckling Zito’s belt. “And someone saw a coyote in the street.”

Zito sucks in a breath. Chavez’s other hand alights to work Zito’s jeans open. He turns his head to the side and his face is inches from the Chicago kid’s, seeing his eyelashes flicker like spider legs, spikes of his blonde hair folding on his forehead. His lips are parted a little bit.

“They were, like, trying to throw rocks at it.” Bending down, Chavez runs his lips down Zito’s jaw, smelling heavily of metallic keg beer. He rubs Zito through his boxers, the gel he put in his hair on the way over smearing on Zito’s cheek. Zito’s back arches slightly, staring at the Chicago’s kid’s mouth. “But I told them to knock it off. Because, like, it’s not the coyote’s fault they built big fucking houses all over. He was probably here first.”

Chavez closes his teeth on Zito’s earlobe. His voice is a vibration, making the hair on Zito’s arms stand up. “And you, you. You’ll fuck around with anybody, won’t you?”

“Lucky for you,” Zito mumbles, moving into Chavez’s grip. His throat thickens, cataloguing the ways that Chavez’s hand is different, minutely smaller and less worked, not tight enough, not fast enough. Not hurried in any way, because they’ve been doing this for years.

Billy Beane goes so quick, terrified of getting caught, also probably scared to recognize what it means to be jerking off a curfewless seventeen year old in an alleyway halfway between the school and home. He makes the whole thing feel like stealing third, trusting speed to protect them.

Zito’s strength fails him. He rips away from Chavez, rolling away and the only direction he can go is into the Chicago boy, pressed all along his body, bare and hard against the boy’s hip. Their foreheads knock together, and Chavez is saying in shock, “What the fuck?”

Zito clutches at the bed, the guy’s shirt, his shoulders drawn up high, as if this can keep him safe. “Get out,” he says hoarsely, his lips moving against the unconscious boy’s. “Leave me alone.”

Chavez’s fists land on his back, and Zito huddles as close as he can get to the Chicago boy, clinging to him like Zito’s the one who’s deadweight.

“He’s fucking _unconscious_ , Z,” Chavez spits at his back. Zito shakes his head, digging his teeth into the already tender inside of his lip. He’s not fucking around with this kid, he’s just using him as a human shield.

“Get out,” he says again, and this time Chavez goes, jerking off the bed and tripping over the carpet, cracking into the wall with head or hands, calling him a motherfucking cocktease and not fucking worth it.

But Zito’s heard that one before.

*

It must have happened slow, Zito figures. There was no decision arrived at or anything like that. They didn’t call family meeting and then vote on adding ‘smoke lots of pot; drink to excess,’ to the free time boxes of their daily schedule. They went from weekends to Wednesday mornings over the course of two months, but they still went by inches.

Summer after sophomore year, when he and Chavez still couldn’t look at each other, and Munson was oblivious of all but the worst indications. There were a lot of worst indications.

Down by the canal, all day on a Sunday, sweating, doing what he could not to notice Chavez in jean shorts and nothing else, Chavez diving sometimes. So fucking hot, smoking something that burned seemed a wonderful idea. Double shots to wash the taste out of their mouths were a stroke of fucking genius.

Realizing at some point that at four in the morning on a day that started twenty-two hours prior, Chavez would sometimes backslide right onto him, hands mouth eyes like nothing was different, this strange rough gift in his life. Zito was always fucked up himself, so he could say it was like a dream, remembered like déjà vu, transference. Something.

Mostly, though, controlled substances were a way to get through nothing to do. They were sixteen years old and this stuff happens sometimes.

*

Beane takes Zito out the east road, through the suburbs until the billboards fade and the streetlamps get spaced out farther and farther until they’re gone. The stars grow thick in the sky, broken yellow line of the highway and Beane’s hands on the wheel.

“This is pretty far,” Zito notes. Tension makes his muscles tight, kicking at his backpack on the floor.

“You’d rather we go back to the fucking alley?”

“No, no. It’s cool. Wherever.” Zito flexes his hands. Wherever, whenever, whatever Beane wants to do to him. He’s okay with it.

Beane rattles his fingers and exhales through his nose. He hasn’t really looked at Zito since they got in the car, which is probably for the best, considering how fast he’s driving.

“We used to come out here,” Beane says. “Nobody’s around, we could be as loud as we wanted. Sleep in the back of the cars, wake up hungover as shit when the sun came up.”

Zito pushes his fingers together, wishing there was more of a moon. There’s nothing to see out there, black as all hell and Beane narrating the pieces of his former life that are very similar to Zito’s present one.

“We go up to six stories a lot,” he contributes weakly. “Did you ever do that?”

“Six stories?”

“The, um, the parking garage downtown? By the old movie theatre?”

Beane’s quiet for a minute, before saying, “They built that seven years ago.”

Zito stalls out, frustrated. He’d thought for a moment that actual conversation beyond sniping and cursing might be possible between them, but, fuck.

Beane is magic, and he finds a road off the highway that’s really just tire tracks in the dirt. Several hundred yards down, he pulls over and turns off the car, and it’s perfectly silent, perfectly dark.

Zito clears his throat, and takes off his shirt. He twists it between his hands, looking over at Beane, but he can’t see anything.

“Jesus,” Zito whispers. “I’m, like. Blind.”

Beane shifts. “Did you just take off your shirt?”

“Yeah.”

Then Beane is rustling, leather-metal sounds of his belt opening, sliding nearer to Zito. “Good,” he says, shockingly close to Zito’s ear, and opens his mouth on the knob of Zito’s shoulder, his hand hot on Zito’s bare chest.

They neck for a little while in the front seat and Zito gets caught up, it’s all so high school and shouldn’t Billy have grown out of this already? He wants to be cool and all-knowing and not a fucking teenager anymore, wants to have something he can give that Beane has never had before.

They get out to move things to the backseat, and Zito’s eyes have adjusted, though the desert is flat and dark and the sky is the exact same. He can barely tell the difference between the two, missing the clear line of the horizon, the vanished moon.

But Beane is crawling on top of him in the backseat and Zito puts one foot on the headrest of the shotgun seat, presses his hands down on the window, bent back over his head, and is happy to be flexible, stricken by Beane between his legs. Beane is silhouetted black on black against the ceiling, stripping off his shirt and tucking it under Zito’s head.

“Fuck,” Beane mutters, one hand flat on the ceiling as he hovers above Zito. “Not your first time, right?”

Zito tries to shake his hair out of his eyes, but his head is wedged against the door, pillowed on Beane’s shirt. “If it was, would you stop?”

Beane sucks on Zito’s collarbone and slides his fingers over Zito’s hips, under his jeans. “Probably not.”

“Well, all right, then.” He helps Beane get him out of his jeans, thrown in the front seat where Zito’s backpack, Zito’s glove, Zito’s homework and the notes from his parents, all reside.

“Tell me. Shit. Tell me you didn’t do this for the first time with some. Someone like me,” Beane says raggedly, and Zito is so glad that he can’t see Beane’s face at the moment.

He hooks his arm around Beane’s neck and pulls him down, kisses him, his leg around Beane’s back.

“No,” he whispers against Beane’s mouth. “No one like you.” Beane’s hand is on him and moving back, and Zito can hear the wicked sound of their breath, skinny slivers of gasps and cut-off groans, and he can hear himself almost moaning, “I wish to god it had been,” can feel Beane’s teeth digging into his shoulder when he says that.

With his head keening back, he sees his own hollow handprints in the steam covering the window.

*

Back at school, their notoriety has increased with the start of the games, and they can’t smoke in the parking lot during lunch anymore. Everybody is watching them now, so Munson steals the custodian’s keys to the gym and they go up the fireproof stairs, up the metal rungs of the ladder to the trapdoor on the roof. There’s a three foot ledge running all along the edge, and they sit with their backs to it, perfectly hidden from view.

Chavez is still angry with Zito, and Munson is in between, transferring the conversation like a conduit. It’s making him look tired and confused, his eyes bright red from the smoke.

“So, like, now she thinks I’m gonna take her to prom,” Munson says, passing the jay to Chavez. “I mean, dude. I can’t take a freshman to prom.”

Zito laughs into his knees, his arm slung around his shins. Tasting denim and dirt, looking out across the crushed gravel and vents sticking up, there’s thick sunlight on the back of his neck, dampening his hair.

“This is all your fault,” Chavez says, and Zito starts, clinging to his ankle. It takes him a moment to realize that Chavez isn’t talking to him. “You understand, this girl was _eleven_ when you were getting your first blowjob.”

There’s a lot to think about there. Primarily, how does Chavez know when Munson got his first blowjob, or really not that, because they’re best friends, long before Zito showed up, they speak in tongues and know each other back and forth. Better than that, then, the fact that Zito wasn’t even fucking born when Beane got his first blowjob.

Munson pokes Zito’s head, and Zito holds up his hand without lifting his face from his knees, feels Munson gently fold the jay into his fingers. He takes a slow sideways pull, so goddamn hot out here in the desert by the ocean, crawling through him like a blood disease.

“You need to stop living in the past, Ricky. Age is just a number. More important, I think she might be kinda crazy.”

“Fucking around with you? No doubt about it.”

Muffled thwap as Munson smacks Chavez. Zito is just gonna be quiet and content with his little stub of a jay and his dreams of winter. He’s not gonna get involved in this at all.

“There’s, like, gotta be a balance,” Munson says thoughtfully. “I can overlook the fact that she’s a freshman, but in return, she’s gotta not call my house six times a day.”

“Or you could just not fuck a freshman. God. You realize that there are people with, like, driver’s licenses who might want to fuck you.”

Awkward silence. Zito is watching the cherry burn steadily, wispy trails of smoke and the filtered sounds of the kids down in the quad drifting high around him. If he looks up, he’ll see Munson looking at Chavez with that strange cornered expression on his face, and Chavez looking back all defiance and bad ideas. Zito has never really been completely clear on what’s happening between the two of them, if anything.

“I’m going back down,” Chavez says, and stands, feet crunching, knees popping. Zito raises his head, absently passing the joint back to Munson. Chavez is pushing his lighter back into his pocket, brushing ash off his shirt.

Munson blinks and turns his wrist, the light catching the face of his watch and bulleting into Zito’s eyes.

“It’s only a quarter till.”

“I’m wrecked. I’m. I’m kinda tired. Think I’m gonna go take a nap in the library.”

Already walking away, Munson tries to catch him, calling, “You’re still gonna cut sixth period with me, right?”

But Chavez is disappearing piece by piece into the trapdoor, swinging down and it’s like he’s being eaten up, legs, stomach, shoulders, head, grasping hands. Munson looks over at Zito, hurt and annoyed.

“The fuck’s his problem these days?”

Zito shrugs, yawning. He tilts into Eric Munson, closing his eyes for ten or fifteen seconds at a stretch, huge eyes and too much sun.

“You think he’s really upset about that girl?” Munson asks worriedly.

“I think he’s upset about anybody you fuck around with that’s not him,” Zito says without thinking, and immediately bites his tongue so hard it bleeds. A bird wings past close to them, shrieking and then gone, and it’s quiet enough to hear the crackle of the paper burning.

“That was a joke,” Zito tries. He grins at Munson, who’s staring at him, petrified. “That was my real funny, high-as-fuck joke, Munce.”

Munson brings the joint to his mouth, his hand trembling slightly. “Not funny,” he says with his voice full of smoke.

Zito sighs and puts his head back on his knees. “Everybody’s a critic.”

They stay up there until the second bell brangs down and to the left, and they’re late again, slipping down the ladder, bruising their shins. They’re running out of excuses and patience and time, time most of all.

*

Zito waits for Beane like he has for the past few weeks, in the parking lot after practice, after Munson has hugged him good night and Chavez has snarled at him over Munson’s shoulder, through the headlights. Zito is beaten down by Chavez chipping away at him, his eyes ringed from not sleeping hardly at all anymore.

He’s been working at first base a lot recently. Beane calls out sometimes, “Barry Zito, pickin’ machine,” and Zito’s face burns and his mouth gets dry and he’s dizzy, stumbling on the short grass.

There’s a tough salted breeze tearing notebook paper and candy bar wrappers across the asphalt. All but three cars are gone, Zito’s, Beane’s, and the night security guard’s. The school is shuttered and still, spooky the way things get when there’s no one around. Zito thinks about writing Beane a note to leave under his windshield wiper, a sad little face asking ‘where were you?’ but instead he just hunches his shoulders and crosses the parking lot, eyes peeled for the guard.

The light is on in Beane’s office window, and the side door to the gym is unlocked. Zito detours into the bathroom, finding his way by memory to the sink, not bothering with the light. He washes his hands and rinses out his mouth and tries to fix his hair, blind.

Beane is at his desk, and of course it’s déjà vu, circled light and Beane’s head cradled on his hand. Zito forces himself to remember the differences, last time he stood in Beane’s office after hours like this, he hadn’t gone down on Beane and hadn’t been fucked by him and hadn’t known that Beane liked to go out to the desert, places without horizons.

Also, there’s a bottle of Jack Daniels and a short tower of Dixie cups, one set upright near Beane’s elbow. Zito coughs, and Beane looks up, his eyes foggy in a way that Zito knows very well.

“Drinking alone? And you call yourself a role model.”

Beane’s lip curls, making Zito’s stomach turn over slowly. “Yeah, I turned twenty-one a while ago, maybe you hadn’t picked up on that. Don’t need to listen to your shit.”

Zito leans on the doorframe, crossing his arms over his chest. Beane checks him out much more blatantly than he usually does, and Zito lifts his eyebrows. “You’re already drunk, aren’t you?”

“I am, fuck. Allowed to be drunk. Fucking seventeen years old, already half an alcoholic, you think you can fucking talk to me?”

Flinching, Zito looks down at the floor, wanting to protest. He hasn’t been drinking nearly as much as he did before he passed out in class; he’s almost strictly herbal these days, or at least, on weekdays. There’s a joint tucked behind his ear, in fact, under his hair, but he’s saving that for later, after Beane drops him off.

“I’ve just never seen you drunk.”

Beane flicks his hand through the air, scowling. “You haven’t seen me a lot of things. Haven’t seen you first thing in the morning. Haven’t seen you sleeping. You haven’t seen me play baseball.”

Zito blinks. “Wait, what?” He’s confused because somewhere in there it seemed like Beane might want to have seen him sleeping.

“You don’t know anything about me,” Beane says, enunciating carefully. “You have coerced me into a relationship that is fucked up and unproductive and totally immoral.”

“ _Coerced_?” Zito half-shouts in disbelief. The echo rebounds off the linoleum.

“ _Yes_ ,” Beane shouts back at him. “Because everyone knows I’m fucking weak and you show up and you want to blow me and what the fuck, I’m supposed to turn down someone who looks like you do, a fucking _kid_ who looks like you do?”

Stunned, Beane glaring at him and crushing the Dixie cup in his hand, Zito knows that this is what he wants from Beane most of all, anger and anything sharp, all things bright, a slam into him and out of the dull, muffled life that waits for him somewhere on the other side of summer.

“So I’ll be fucking drunk and you don’t talk to me like I’m the one with the problem,” Beane continues, losing his focus a little bit, slurring at the ends of words. “God _damn_ it. Get over here, already.”

Zito is moving before he can think, thinking about tethers and magnets and how fucking destroyed he’s going to be when Beane is finished with him. He starts to go to his knees, but Beane grips his shoulder and kisses him instead. Beane stands in the middle of it, his tongue in Zito’s mouth, and it’s so strange to feel him rising, Zito’s back straightening. He clenches his hands in Beane’s shirt and they’re almost exactly the same height. It’s like it’s meant to be.

But Beane is drunk, very drunk, drunk enough to pass out at nine o’clock in the morning, in the middle of class, and he sways as they pull back. Zito holds him steady, his heartbeat jamming in his chest.

Beane takes the bottle off the desk and takes a long drink. Zito ducks his head and places his tongue against Beane’s throat to feel him swallowing, hearing the click and almost tasting the liquor through his skin.

“Why didn’t you come out to get me?” Zito asks, his lips still on Beane’s throat. “You knew I was waiting.”

Beane’s hair brushes on Zito’s cheek, his hand in Zito’s back pocket. “I’m having a midlife crisis.” He chuffs a laugh. “Actually, I think you are my midlife crisis.”

“So?” Zito lifts his face, touching his thumb to the puffy skin under Beane’s eye. “That means I can’t get drunk in your office with you?”

“I was _trying_ not to corrupt you,” Beane says, but it’s got to be a joke and Zito kisses him, not at all sure how to deal with this baseless diving sensation in his stomach, the way he’s so happy right now he almost wants to die.

“Well. Just for clarification’s sake? You probably should have thought of that before you fucked me.” Zito grins, and Beane groans, hides his face in Zito’s shoulder. Zito touches his back and says with his voice thick, “I was already corrupted, anyway, man, you know that. Come on. I’ll drive you home.”

Beane nods, tired in the sides of his mouth and the slowness of his movements. He fumbles getting the cap back on the whiskey and slides it into the brown paper bag it came in. His hands are totally off Zito by the time they get into the hallway, and they stay that way all the way to the car.

Zito is strangely endeared to the fact that he doesn’t have to move the driver’s seat back at all in Beane’s car, though, at this point, the passenger’s side is almost always set for him. He thinks he’s probably the only one riding around in Beane’s car these days.

Beane is slumped down, sipping occasionally at the bottle of whiskey. From the side, in the streetlamp dark, with his face turned a bit towards the window and his hair mussed, falling across his forehead, Beane looks a little like Eric Chavez. Something in the line of his jaw.

Swallowing, Zito says, “Tell me about being in the major leagues.”

Beane snorts, the paper bag crinkling as he twists his hand. “You don’t want to hear about it.”

“Of course I do.”

“Then ask Randy fucking Jones, why don’t you,” Beane says sharp, and Zito tries to remember how Beane knows that he’d trained with Jones, if he’d told him or if Beane was just checking up on him. Zito feels stupid, he could have asked Randy all about Billy Beane, even if they haven’t really talked since the summer after sophomore year.

“I wanna hear about it from you, Billy.”

Rolling his head on the window, Beane gives Zito a long look with his mostly closed eyes.

“You shouldn’t say my name like that.” Zito’s about to ask what he means, but Beane’s continuing, “Major league baseball. It’s, it’s like, here’s this thing you always wanted. The only thing. And you’d do anything, I did _everything_. Everything they asked me to. Run. Throw. Hit. Here’s a wall to run into. Here’s warning track that feels like fucking crushed glass when you dive. Here’s minor league buses and fucking motel rooms with rats and no hot water. Here’s wooden bats that splinter if you miss even a little bit.”

Beane exhales heavily, taking a drink. Zito would ask for some if he thought that there was a chance in hell Beane would agree. He thinks of pitching to Munson and Chavez on the T-ball field at Poway Community Park, long afterschool afternoons when over the two-trunked elm tree meant a home run.

“And they keep telling you all the things you’re gonna be,” Beane goes on, drunkenly folding his fingers in and out. “Until it’s like, this is the only possible life. There’s no other way. And then you get there. Nothing’s like you thought it would be. Nothing’s easy. I had this one thing, and then it wasn’t there anymore. It’s the only possible life and I can’t do it.”

There’s nothing much to say about that, and they drive for a little while before Beane blinks at the street and says, “Where the fuck—turn around, deuce, you needed to take a left like two miles ago.”

Zito sighs and hooks a great sweeping u-turn in the middle of the road. “You need to navigate better than this.”

“I navigate fucking fine.”

Tapping his fingers on the wheel, bleary neon signs streaking past, Zito asks, “That’s what you think’ll happen to me? That’s why you think I should go to college?”

Beane’s quiet, screwing his hand on the paper bag around the neck of the bottle. Zito is sneaking peeks at him, unused to the size of Beane’s car, the whine of the brakes when he pushes down too fast.

“You won’t get drafted,” Beane tells him eventually. Zito thinks that it should hurt to hear that from Beane, but weirdly enough, it doesn’t really. “Or, not very high. Not first round, that’s for goddamn sure, not the second, and probably, probably not at all. High school pitchers, they’re looking for power. They figure they can teach everything else.”

“I already know everything else.”

“You’re getting it backwards. You throw eighty-five miles an hour on your best day. No curveball in the world changes that. They don’t care about kids like you.”

This should really hurt more than it does. Zito thinks about college, UCSD like his mom wants, USC near his sisters, somewhere further up the coast where people won’t know him. Four more years to be irresponsible and made blameless by his youth. He looks at Beane all blurry and rough in the passenger seat, and thinks that he’d like to stay local.

“What about the others?”

Beane tells him to take the turn he missed, and then says, “Chavez’ll go high. First round, but he’s an infielder, so. Duncan might, too, but I heard him talking to some of those scouts and he’s an idiot, he wants too much money. Munson.” Beane shrugs. “Munson’s got an awful lot of holes in his swing that he hides pretty fucking well, but that won’t hold up. Scouts are already starting to pick up on it. He’ll be lucky to go in the second round.”

Zito jerks a little bit. Chavez and Munson have planned their whole lives around draft day, three months away now. It hasn’t occurred to Zito yet, what’ll happen if they don’t go near each other. If Chavez goes in the first round and Munson the second, Zito’s not sure if that’s a blow that their fragile, deeply committed friendship can weather.

Beane smirks at him. “Nobody stays together. That’s what the fucking game does to you.”

Zito doesn’t want to think about that, the upcoming summer that they will spend in the aftermath of the draft, whatever the draft brings them. He can see it so clearly, Chavez slick with sweat and Munson cheerful, resentful, pitching at Chavez’s head. They’ll come over to help him pack for college and Chavez will want to fuck him while Munson is in the kitchen fixing lemonade or something stupid like that. Chavez will use their past against Zito, and every time Chavez smiles, Zito will be able to see the shutdown in Eric Munson’s face.

He asks softly, “What did the game do to you?”

Beane is answering his questions, for once. Zito can get all the answers he wants right now, before they get to Beane’s place, where he has never been.

Beane finishes off the whiskey before he answers, flipping the empty bottle into the backseat. He swipes the back of his hand across his mouth, grimacing and swallowing hard.

“It broke me.”

Zito doesn’t ask him anything else.

*

Beane lives in a two-room apartment above a liquor store, smaller and shabbier than Zito expected. Beane sees the look on his face and mutters something about five years on the skid, signing bonus long since spent, something like, anybody who still lives with his parents needs to shut the fuck up about it. Zito hasn’t even said anything, but he’s never been very good keeping things off his face.

And he likes it, anyway, the scratches in the walls and the clean counters. He likes the bed with mismatched sheets, blue and gray, and the TV Guides stacked under the short leg of the table, and the boxes of baseball cards, and the dented punching bag hung by chain from the ceiling. He likes the way Beane relaxes when they’re inside and the door’s closed.

Streetlight and neon bleed through the blinds, green stripes on Beane’s chest. He’s too drunk to fuck Zito properly, but Zito still gets off, because he’s still seventeen years old. Beane passes out, a mess with his arms folded under his head. Zito watches the dust settle on Beane’s back for awhile, then gets up and fixes his jeans and retrieves the joint from where it fell from behind his ear, when Beane ripped his shirt off him. He climbs out the window onto the fire escape.

San Diego glows. There’s a man down on the corner, working carefully through a six pack of beer, crushing the cans between his hands and dropping them down the sewer grate. Zito smokes his joint and wonders where Munson and Chavez are right now, if they could ever guess where he is.

He goes back in, looks through the boxes and drawers and closets. He finds warm-up T-shirts for the Mets and the Twins and the A’s, team pictures with faces X-ed out like yearbook photos, a copy of finalized divorce papers that are wrinkled and stiff with dried liquor. There are signed baseballs and he tries to make out the names by the light of the window, but it’s no use.

Zito hides little bits and pieces of himself, receipts and old baseball tickets and his keyring. He cuts the button off his jeans with Beane’s penknife and leaves it in the bedside table. Climbs back in bed next to Beane and sets the alarm clock for five in the morning, enough time to catch the bus back home before school.

*

Before the game that Friday, Zito falls asleep in the back of Eric Munson’s car after lunch, missing both his afternoon classes. Chavez comes to get him after the last bell, startling Zito awake by thomping on the car window, blurred like a ghost through the dusty air and the backlit sun, the film on Zito’s eyes.

But Chavez opens the car door and says, “Sorry.”

Unable to make out the expression on Chavez’s face with the sun directly behind his head, Zito is suspicious of everything, bracing his hands on the seat.

Chavez offers him a bottle of water. They don’t say much, Zito with his legs out the open door and Chavez leaning back on the side of the car, arms crossed. Zito’s bones feel made out of cotton.

They change and head for the field, and Munson catches up, pushing reflexively between the two of them. Zito is keeping up the conversation, keeping his eye on Beane, over by the fence with one of the other coaches. Zito’s playing first today and that’s an important thing to remember.

The other team’s bus pulls into the parking lot, and kids in blue-trimmed uniforms spill out. Munson and Zito and Chavez form a loose triangle in short left to play catch, warm up. Chavez and Munson argue idly about the location of the Graig Nettles bat of which they share custody.

“Hey.”

A kid at Zito’s back. Shaggy black hair and pretty tall, distantly familiar the way almost everyone is to Zito.

He smiles. “Hello.”

The kid sorta laughs. He’s wearing the other team’s uniform, his mouth curled up on one side. “Monterey Park, remember? Danny?”

Clicks in, and Zito thinks for a moment, _oh right danny small fucking world_ , and then right on the heels of that, _shit_.

“Right, right,” Zito nods enthusiastically. “Danny. I remember.” He catches a toss from Chavez, seeing Chavez say something to Munson, unintelligible from behind his glove.” “How’s it going?”

“Good.” Danny’s smiling at him. It’s all terrifically awkward. “I didn’t know you played.”

Zito really needs to get out of this habit of screwing around with guys who know absolutely zero about him. He shrugs, looks away from Chavez’s irritating smirk, the afternoon sun in his eyes.

Danny seems to sense the tension and eases back, saying, “Luck,” and then, “Later,” something shuttered in his expression, and Zito should probably take that as an invitation, he’s taken less, but he’s busy now and he’ll be busy later, and nothing that happens in a garage should come back to haunt you.

They’re called in by Beane, who is without sunglasses and doesn’t appear to be hiding at all. Sitting in the dugout, Chavez leans over to whisper in Zito’s ear, “Fraternizing?”

Zito scowls and watches Beane’s shadow so that he won’t be staring at Beane himself. He ignores Chavez until after fielding warm-ups.

Zito plays first, and Danny plays third, and they pass each other on the field a couple of times, coming on and off. Chavez hits a homerun that clears the fence and the grass and makes the parking lot four hundred and seventy feet away. The whole universe freezes for the time it takes the ball to almost disappear into the colorless strip of sky just above the horizon.

They win. All they’ve done since the season started is win. Beane operates in a state of vengeful anger, but it works in context of the game, the packed stands. They are the best high school team in the country and sometimes little gold-haired kids with Texas accents ask them for autographs.

After the game, Munson says what about going down to the beach, and Chavez is nodding, four-for-five on the night and just fucking glowing with it. Zito puts his hand on the back of Chavez’s neck and begs off.

They shower and dress and leave, and Zito takes his time, waiting until all of his teammates are gone before slipping outside. The kid, Danny, the third baseman, is waiting for him.

Zito stops short, Danny in street clothes and suddenly achingly familiar, that night in the garage, Danny wearing a blue shirt with yellow rings around the sleeves and collar, Danny’s mouth slanting across his own and how Danny went to his knees like he was born for it. Danny is a sophomore, he likes girl singers and lime jello shots, he plays third base and is more afraid of darkness than heights.

But then Zito remembers that it was only one night and the of course impossible circumstance, and his eyebrows fall for a moment, remembers that Beane’s gonna be out in a second and Danny kinda needs to be gone.

“What’s up?” Zito asks tiredly.

Danny, his shoulder against the wall, gives the impression of shrugging. “You throw left-handed. I found that interesting, because I swear to god you used your right on me that night.”

Zito is shocked where he stands, but he plays it off by rolling his eyes and stuffing his hands in his pockets. “Yeah, I don’t really remember.”

Danny’s eyes narrow a bit. “Okay. You wanna go do something?”

“Can’t.”

“No?”

“Prior engagement.” Danny’s mouth pulls down at the corners, and Zito flips up his hood, tipping his chin to Danny. “I’ll see you around.”

Shaking his head, Danny turns away, walking all the way across the parking lot. Zito doesn’t know how he’s gonna get back to Monterey Park; he’s long missed the bus. Thinking about the many things he would like to do the stupid skinny kid if he did not have other priorities, watching Danny’s shoulders cast a wide shadow when he moves under the amber parking lot floodlights, Zito is caught remembering fifteen years old, a generation ago, brash and stubborn and overjoyed at the possibility of screwing around with someone, anyone.

It’s really not Danny’s fault.

“Well,” Beane says at his elbow, making Zito jump. Beane has changed, and washed his face but not his hair. He looks at Zito with a layered expression. “You know that kid?”

Zito sighs. One-night stands are suddenly so much fucking trouble. He didn’t used to live like this.

“Met up with him at a party once,” Zito answers, which is pretty close, all things considered.

Beane kinda hums, and they walk out to his car. Zito thinks that they’ve gotten sloppy, walking out together so visibly, but he thinks of the McDonalds’ parking lot, when Beane had lifted him up out of harm’s way and drove him off campus in broad daylight, with official approval.

Settled, moving, Beane says something about the game, tough hop in the sixth inning, but Zito just exhales. Beane goes a little faster and says, “You coulda gone with him.”

Zito shoots him a glare. “Didn’t want to.”

“Just saying. That ambidextrous thing is crazy as fuck, by the way. Constantly amazes.” Beane grins evilly, and Zito hates most of the world right now. He rolls his head back on the seat.

“Whatever. I fucked around with the Monterey Park third baseman. And he’s not exactly the only one in the league, so. This might happen a couple more times.”

Beane nods, keeping his eyes on the road. “I think it’s great that you’re so taking advantage of this high school baseball superstar moment of yours.”

“Sure. Sure. You know, Munson’s cousin was in the year behind you when you were here. She told us about when you. When you were like me. Except, you know. With girls.”

Fifty miles an hour now, down shaded stop-signed residential streets, blowing past dim houses.

“Yeah, so?” Beane is casting bad stares over at Zito, half gonna-fuck-you and half gonna-beat-you-bloody. “I’m not telling you not to sleep around. Sleeping around is one of the best parts of high school. I would kinda prefer you kept opposing players out of it, but then you’d probably just turn on your teammates, and that wouldn’t end well for anyone.”

Zito flinches hard. He considers telling Beane that he has already turned on his teammates, that a teammate was the very first one he’d turned on, but it’s hard to think of ways to describe what it was like between him and Chavez.

“Anyway,” Zito says. “I’m not. Anymore. I mean, not since the games started. I think maybe I’m done with that stuff. Grown out of it.”

“Ha.” Beane glances at him, his mouth bent slightly up instead of down.

Zito folds his hands together on his knee and counts the white fenceposts and the palm trees and thinks about the next few hours, once they get to Beane’s apartment.

*

They’re only supposed to be at six stories for a quick pick-me-up before the night’s parties, but they get off-track sometime between the fourth joint and the second time the thermos gets refilled. They stay up on top of the parking garage for hours.

Chavez is lying near to him, their jackets balled up under their heads. Munson has run down to the Circle K for candy, and there are nine hundred thousand stars above them, at least.

Chavez asks him where he went last night, and Zito winds a bit of Chavez’s shirt between his fingers, not answering. Tonight he is not thinking about Billy Beane.

Several weeks pass, everything skewed out of true. Zito falls into a routine, school with Munson and Chavez, nights with Beane, baseball occurring in flickers and sparks in between. Munson takes to affection and nostalgia when he’s drunk, the three of them painfully aware that they have four months, tops, and then on to whatever comes next.

Beane is less interpretable. He starts buying orange juice and vodka, lets Zito use his shower and his washing machine, tells scouts that Zito’s the best left-handed pitcher in Southern California, and talks in his sleep sometimes about fires. No time limit on this thing, this strange and petulant need to be with Beane all the time, his mind set and fixed and unforgiving.

Zito is beginning to get the sense that getting over this is going to take exponentially longer than the actual relationship. Or whatever. Scars in high school are as permanent as anything ever gets. Second name carved into him right next to Eric Chavez’s, and it’s only been two years; it seems too much for it to happen twice in such a short interval.

But he can see Billy Beane’s apartment in the back of his mind all the time, half-hour before dawn on a school day, when the air is warming outside but it’s still dark, the two of them in bed under a single sheet. Zito hardly ever sleeps at normal times. This is something he will remember at moments of stress and doubt, white sheet and the breaks of streetlight on Beane’s shoulders, his back. Calm right down.

He’s gaining touchstones, losing ground. Life is a great and beautiful thing, if only because it happens so briefly.

*

Chavez corners Zito back around the gym, where Zito is breaking promises and drinking from a plastic soda bottle with the label torn off. Thin watery sun, the fifteen minute break between second and third periods, ten o’clock in the morning. New graffiti on the side of the building, ribbons tied to the chainlink fence.

Taking the bottle out of Zito’s hand, Chavez asks, “So what are we doing on Friday?” He takes a drink before Zito can respond, turns an alarming shade. “ _Jesus_ , how much fucking rum is in there?”

He digs around in his backpack for his own bottle of water, glaring at Zito. Zito shrugs, throws some more down. Half-drunk already while moving on two hours of sleep, Zito is not well-equipped at the moment to debate the advisability of the situation.

“Anyway. You fucking drunk.” Chavez sounds affectionate, and it kinda hurts to hear. “Friday. Plans.”

“Yes. My birthday.” Zito’s been counting the days.

“Your eighteenth birthday. _Finally_ , you’re legal.”

“You’ve only been legal for five months. And, hello, fake ID. When was the last time you wanted to go anywhere that I couldn’t get into?”

Chavez grins. “It’s gonna be epic. Mark the occasion.”

Zito leans back against the fence, passes Chavez the bottle when Chavez holds out his hand for it. Broken glass in the parking lot spears sunlight into his eyes. It’s nice to be out here in the morning with Eric Chavez, Chavez who finally seems to like him again.

“Munce wants to go up to L.A.,” Zito says, distractedly staring at Chavez’s arms and the smooth lines of his shoulders. Chavez doesn’t even notice, busy watching Zito’s mouth. “Timmy and some of those guys who went to USC, they’re having a party.”

“College party. I like it.”

Chavez leans his head back on the fence, his hands folded behind his back. Zito thinks about Beane saying that Chavez would go high first round, wonders what it’s like to know that as Chavez knows it, as everyone knows it, to have that kind of security. Chavez can do whatever he wants next year, but Zito has a pretty good feeling that if Eric Munson goes to college, Chavez will be in the bunk above him.

“So,” Chavez says after awhile, still looking up at the sky. “Billy excited that you’re not gonna be a minor anymore?”

Crushed, astonishingly injured, Zito pushes his elbows back against the stone wall and bites the inside of his cheek. He stares at the spots of rust on the fence next to Chavez.

“Could we, like, not do this today?” Zito manages. He can’t get into it with Chavez, all the stuff that will get pulled out if they fight about it for too long. Billy Beane is undeniably the dumbest thing that’s ever happened to him, and Chavez won’t let him get away with that.

Chavez narrows his eyes. “When would you prefer?”

“Dude. I can’t explain it. I can’t tell you what I’m doing or why or, or anything.”

Chavez nods and looks away. He’s really kinda perfect, leaning against the fence like this, in the sunlight and metal.

“I don’t know why I’m surprised, really,” Chavez says mildly. “You have terrible judgment with these things.”

Zito recognizes his cue, and he steps forward, presses the soda bottle into Chavez’s stomach. “Yeah, tell me about it.”

Chavez angles his face up, his hand falling on Zito’s wrist, two of Zito’s fingers curled under the bottle and tucked against the dent of Chavez’s hip. Zito remembers Chavez in the park, suddenly, after dark and before their parents gave up on curfews, sophomore year and meeting up cold sober to fool around up against a tree. Chavez in the streetlight, several inches shorter than Zito because he hadn’t really sprouted until the middle of his sixteenth year. Zito remembers holding Chavez’s shoulders down and sucking on his collarbone through his shirt.

Chavez watches him carefully for a minute, then licks his lips and sighs. “You give me ideas, man, you know that?” He takes the bottle and Zito’s arm drops. Long drink, and Zito has to step away, get his bearings again.

“I am sorry, though,” Zito hears himself saying. He blinks in surprise.

Chavez pauses. “What for?”

Zito shakes his head, confused and not making much sense inside his head. He knows too much about Chavez, and it’s blurring his best conclusions.

“It’s not like. I didn’t mean for it to happen. It wasn’t because you-”

“Hang on.” Chavez places his hand on Zito’s chest and Zito jerks. “Don’t say something you’ll regret.”

Zito scoffs. “What’s one more thing?”

Knuckles pushing down hard, Chavez scowls at him. “Listen, you don’t need to, like. Apologize to me.”

“Old habit.”

Chavez stops, gives him a sideways look. Zito smiles, finishes off what’s left in the bottle. Nicely buzzed now, able to appreciate all of this. He hasn’t had Chavez this civil in a month.

“I didn’t think you and him had anything to do with you and me, is what I’m saying,” Chavez tells him, his face angled down. “Because it was a long time ago, you know?”

Zito sorta laughs, rubbing his face with his hand, never anything but tired. He’s always halfway admired Chavez’s ability to keep what happened sophomore year completely separate from what’s been happening ever since. Zito has a tendency to mix things up, not as attached to a linear timeline.

“Everything I do for the rest of my life is gonna have something to do with you and me, dude. First for everything, remember?”

Chavez meets his eyes, smirking a little bit. “First for everything.”

Background, Zito thinks. His whole history right here, save the past three months. He wants to go back and change stuff, relive certain parts again, fix it so that he will be less fucked up in the present.

“Late,” Chavez says, tipping his head towards the school. They get their backpacks and wash out their mouths with Chavez’s water, and start walking back around the gym. “It’s weird, you know?”

“What?”

Chavez hooks his thumbs in his straps. “We’re having, like, real problems. This isn’t just kid’s stuff anymore.”

Zito nods, thinking that that’s about right, the years are like lifetimes now. He can remember being distinctly different only a few months ago.

*

On his eighteenth birthday, Munson ties a bow around a quarter-ounce and Chavez wraps a bottle of twenty year old scotch in the comics page. It’s entirely possible that they’ll kill both over the course of the weekend, because Zito is already ripped to shreds when they put him in the backseat and drive him to Los Angeles.

The party is louder than most of the ones they go to, and their friends, seniors when they were sophomores, are starkly more grown-up. Timmy, on whom Zito had a fairly big crush before his attention reverted irreparably to Chavez, tells them, “You guys have gotten much cooler.”

Munson and Chavez end up passed out in the upstairs bathroom, Chavez in the tub and Munson on the floor. Zito and some of the guys fuck around, drawing on their faces and balancing things on their heads and taking pictures, and then put blankets over them and turn off the light.

Zito needs to get back to San Diego, and after smoking some of Zito’s birthday present, Timmy agrees to drive him, red-rimmed eyes and his face dark, days unshaven because he is a college boy, and that’s allowed.

They listen to eighties music on the drive down and talk about baseball. When Zito directs him to Beane’s apartment, Timmy says something about, thought you lived over on Edgewood, and Zito cracks a fresh beer, says, yeah, I moved.

They slap-hug in the front seat and then Zito’s standing on the sidewalk, waving goodbye. Up the stairs, his balance is totally gone and the blown-out bulbs of the lamps are making his life overly difficult.

He doesn’t have to knock long before Beane appears. Zito grins big at him. “No longer a felony.”

Beane rolls his eyes, pulls Zito inside. Zito almost trips over the carpet. “Still irritating, though.”

Zito steadies himself with a hand on the wall. “Billy. We’re not breaking the law anymore. Be happy.”

He rolls his eyes again. Zito studies him in his sweats and thready T-shirt and wonders what time it is. It feels close to dawn.

“I’m thrilled, really,” Beane says, but he’s crossed his arms over his chest and is giving Zito a familiar hooded look. Zito straightens and pushes his hair back. He thinks joyfully that he has made it through another day, he has gotten to the point again.

“I’m supposed to be in L.A. I can stay all night.”

Beane’s eyes flash. He’s got Zito back against the wall before Zito can get his mind in order, a hand under his shirt and a hand working on his pants. Zito’s head skids and he closes his arms tight around Beane’s shoulders.

*

It’s four in the morning, a few weeks later, and neither of them can sleep. Zito’s circadian rhythms are all fucked up; he’s devolved to nocturnal, skipping whole days of school to sleep until three in the afternoon in order to be up till dawn. He’s already technically graduated, credits done, and there’s something every night. Bad ideas and just like he remembers, baseball the axis of the world, the thing all else rotated around.

They can’t sleep. Beane rolls out of bed and Zito shuffles after him. There’s orange juice in the refrigerator and vodka in the icebox. Beane will let this pass, once, because it’s just going to help Zito get some rest before he shows up for practice after school.

Sitting across from each other at the table, not bothering to turn the lights on, Zito’s feet curl around the legs of Beane’s chair, and they talk a little while about the course of the year, the almost-finished season that is the whole span of their common ground. Beane shakes his head and smiles and says, “Chavez is going top ten, but not as a shortstop.”

Sometimes, it seems like Beane can see the future.

Zito slumps and turns one ankle in so that it rests alongside Beane’s foot. Beane blinks slow, drinking and looking down at the table. Zito remembers Beane telling him about the five year skid, in slip-ups and under the influence, and he’s not sure how Beane is able to tell that it’s stopped.

Everything gains a slight haze. Light grows out the windows; the nights are so short. Zito wants to know where Beane woulda gone to college, if he’d’ve gone.

Beane smirks and rubs his thumb on the jelly glass. “Stanford.”

“Shit.” Zito is not quite drawling, not yet drunk. “That’s a smart person school.”

“Good baseball team, though.” Beane arranges his fingers on the glass in a vaguely familiar grip. “You’re still looking at, what, Santa Barbara?”

Zito props his hand under his head, yawning. “I don’t know, man. I don’t think I wanna be that far away.”

There’s a long pause, and then Beane says quietly, “Yeah.”

They finish two glasses each, and Zito falls against Beane in the hallway, his face against Beane’s shoulder, arm around Beane’s waist. Beane drops him onto the bed and then kneels, puts his hands on Zito’s pajama pants. Zito shivers, and watches the reflected headlights from the street wash across the ceiling, thinking that he’ll be skinned alive before he’ll let them take this away from him.

It’s just the way he gets near summer.

*

Three days before the end of the school year, two weeks before the draft, they spend all night in the park. At times, they can smell the ocean. With their eyesight adjusted, they play catch under the moon, and when Munson passes the joint off and announces his intent to climb the tree where Zito first met them, Zito and Chavez are nothing but encouraging.

Munson does well, considering that Zito is barely still standing. He reaches the top and punches through, his head emerging out of the leaves. Half in and half out, he grins whitely down at them and waves, sketched out against the sky like a photograph in a textbook, grayish and sharp.

“Jesus,” Chavez breathes out. “Would you look at him.”

Zito shakes his head and puts his arm around Chavez’s shoulders.

They lie around on the grass, worrying about the future. Zito can see it in the way Munce fiddles with a baseball, and Chavez combing his fingers through the grass. They’re neither of them twitchy by nature.

Earlier, they’d played their last game of the season, the Southern California Regional Championship, and had been severely upset by a fucking desert team, kids out of nowhere. Zito had pitched and nothing stayed down. Everybody made contact.

Zito can’t really tell, but it’s possible that by losing this game, he’s caused more damage than he suspects.

Munson and Chavez are talking softly, thinking that Zito has fallen asleep, and Zito catches swatches of it, something about San Diego with the ninth pick of the draft, and what if. Something about the way Munson is dropping his shoulder on stuff off the plate, and Chavez saying, “No matter what happens.”

Zito waits until he’s sure they’ve passed out, and then puts his shoes and socks back on, shoulders his backpack and walks five blocks down to the Circle K. He’s short a dime and has to make a collect call, resting his forehead on the dirty side of the pay phone.

Drunk enough that the few cars seem to melt, headlights and slick metal, Zito sits on the curb, turning over important facts in his mind. Beane arrives within ten minutes, and doesn’t even mutter about the hour.

“You’ve got grass in your hair.”

Zito brushes his hand across it, and bits fall into the seat and the floor. “Yeah, they mow it on Tuesday mornings.”

“Done this a time or two before, have we?” Beane says with a quick smirk.

“Hey. I grew up in that park. Some of the most important things ever in my life happened in that park.”

He wonders if Beane has any candy in this car, Jolly Ranchers or mints or something. Clean the taste out of his mouth, prepare him for other things.

Beane reaches for something in the cupholder and Zito realizes it’s an open beer. He suppresses a smirk of his own, scooting his shoulders down and propping his knee on the glove compartment. He thinks that Beane might not be the only bad influence in the car.

“What are those guys doing for the summer?” Beane asks. Zito shrugs.

“Chavvy’s gonna work at his uncle’s restaurant, and Munson’s gonna look for a job for two months and then just give up and hang around with one of us for the rest of it.”

Last summer, same thing, and sometimes after the restaurant closed, Chavez would let Zito and Munson in and they’d eat ice cream and good fresh bread and butter, sitting in the wooden booth by the door of the kitchen, drinking wine and laughing a lot.

Zito will be taking photographs for a local surf magazine, a fact that had made Beane’s face twist in a way that Zito’d never seen, just before breaking into laughter. Zito’s done it for the past three years, so he doesn’t really see what the big deal is.

“Billy?”

“Hmm.”

“What do you think it was on that triple in the fourth, I feel like I left it up but Munce said that I tipped it.”

Beane takes a drink and doesn’t even acknowledge Zito when Zito reaches his hand out imploringly in the direction of the beer. “You threw a fastball on a one-and-two count. It was a little bit high, too, but mostly just a stupid thing to throw.”

Zito’s about to retort that he didn’t _call_ for the damn thing, because when Zito is pitching badly, he cedes Munson control of everything, but Beane glances in the rearview and tenses suddenly.

“Shit.” He looks over at Zito, hard and calculating. “Buckle up your seatbelt. We’re getting pulled over.”

Beane drains the beer and gives Zito the can to put under the seat. He asks for gum as he slows down, and Zito still going through his pockets when the cop comes to the window.

It doesn’t take much, really. Beane smells of beer and Zito of rum. Zito is the only one who’s actually drunk, Beane’s probably had two beers in the past three hours or something, but Zito’s also the one who’s underage, and fucking no doubt _looks_ it, as Beane will say to him rather cruelly, in the police station when they’re getting arrested.

They take Beane out of the car first, and then Zito when Zito tries to explain out the window that they’re making a big mistake. Beane’s totally not drunk and glaring back at Zito, all white from the cruiser’s headlights. It doesn’t seem particularly fair, Beane was the one who was speeding, but Zito’s willing to concede that he’s the reason lawbreaking seems so instinctive to them.

They find out Zito’s eighteen and also that Beane’s thirty-four, although they don’t really care much about that, no more than to ask a few exceptionally rude questions about what they’re doing together. Zito can’t think of a good answer, anyway.

Beane, driving under the influence, barely over the legal limit. Zito, misdemeanor intoxication. Beane’s hands are clenched so tight his knuckles have paled. In the back of the squad car, Zito whispers to him, “Is this really fucking happening, dude?”

Beane’s got his fists pressed up against his temples, his elbows on his knees. He doesn’t say anything, eyes screwed shut. Zito sits back and watches the red and blue light spill across parked cars and front windows. Everything seems supernaturally sharp, angles and colors drawn as if by razors.

Zito gets put in a little room with a table and chairs while they wake up his parents. He’s very tired, and getting into this cataclysmic kind of trouble is helpful in that it will let him sleep.

Beane comes in, his fingers smudged with black ink, tucking his wallet into his back pocket.

“I’m going home now,” he says, staying across the room from Zito.

Lifting his eyebrows, Zito asks, “They’re letting you go?”

“It’s barely a citation, deuce. Suspended license for six months. I’m allowed to call a fucking cab.”

Zito sits up, feeling uncertain. Beane eyes him with distrust, keeping his hands back. “I, um. I’m sorry. I’m not sure if it was completely my fault. But, then, I’m pretty drunk.”

He attempts a smile, but Beane’s face hardens.

“You’re drunk twenty hours a day. Nobody fucking cares about you being drunk.”

Zito shows his own blackened fingers. “Cared enough to arrest me, didn’t they?”

Beane sinks into the chair across from Zito. “Fuck. They _arrested_ you.” He rattles his fingers on the table like he’s going through cigarette withdrawal, though Beane is strictly a Copenhagen man.

“It’s okay. I know a bunch of kids who’ve been arrested. It blows over.”

Shaking his head, Beane scowls at the scuff marks on the table. “You’re not a minor anymore. You’ve got the, the fucking draft, or college, or whatever. Stuff that’s supposed to happen. This is going to follow you around for a real long time.”

“Yeah, well.” Zito moves his shoulders. “Lots of stuff does that.”

Beane looks at him, a fingerprint of ink on the edge of his jaw, a stray piece of grass in the fold of his shirt sleeve. Zito thinks that the worst part about all of this is that now he doesn’t get to go home with Beane.

Beane stands. “I’d stick around, but this isn’t exactly the best way for me to meet your folks.” He checks for his wallet and for his watch, and then pulls a couple of wrapped peppermints out of his pocket. “Here. The staff sergeant had a dish of them on his desk.”

He tosses them onto the table and Zito closes his hand around them, says good night, says I’ll see you tomorrow, and sees Beane rub at his eyes with the back of his wrist, his shoulders down, going home.

*

The next day, at school, it’s not until lunch that the gossip travels back to them, and Munson shows up in an air of bewildered disbelief, asking, “Somebody told me that Lauren Hayes’s dad arrested you and Billy Beane last night?”

Zito freezes in the backseat, staring at Chavez’s eyes in the rearview. Munson peers back at him. “What the fuck, dude?”

Chavez’s face twitches. “How the hell can they arrest you, you’re eighteen years old now. Age of fucking consent, man.”

Zito blinks at him, aghast. “It was for drinking, Chavvy, you incredible moron. But thank you.”

“Wait, _what_ ,” Munson fairly screeches. “You did _what_ with our motherfucking coach?”

Zito puts his hands up over his eyes. It got so loud so fast. Reflexively, he snares a jay from the cigarette pack in his backpack, lights it up, anesthetize the situation before it gets out of hand.

There’s no way to go but to tell the truth. Why was he getting picked up by Beane at three in the morning, after abandoning his friends in the park? Why did he need a ride when his house was a two-minute walk away? Why were they both drunk? Where were they going? Too much that he’s not smart enough to have an explanation for.

“I’ve been sleeping with Beane since before the games started. He was driving me back to his place last night because I called him and asked him to, and we got pulled over for speeding and then we both got arrested for being drunk, even though Billy wasn’t really.”

Munson’s expression deserves to be cast in bronze. Dictionary definition of shocked, boggled eyes, open mouth. Zito sighs and passes him the joint, the smoke spiraling up and making Munson blink, at least. Chavez isn’t meeting his eyes in the rearview any more, turned towards the window, almost completely hidden behind the seat, only his elbow visible.

“Okay, um. That’s a lot to process, I guess.” Zito rubs his hands together, wishing kinda sadly that the entire goddamn school wasn’t talking about him and Beane today. Hard to shake, something like this. Thank god it’s finals week.

Breathing out, Munson says, “Jesus fucking Christ, Billy _Beane_?” He turns to Chavez. “You knew about this?”

Zito slumps back, rolling his eyes, once again relegated to an afterthought in the Munce and Chavvy Show.

Chavez puts his hand on the side of the seat and his voice is low and tight, “I don’t always have to tell you everything.”

“It wasn’t his to tell,” Zito cuts in, not liking the way Chavez’s hand is clenched on the seat, fingers dug into the vinyl. “If I wanted you to know, I’da told you myself.”

“And what makes him so special, you’ll tell him and not me?”

“Me and Ricky got more in common than you and me do, Munce.”

Chavez jerks and his eyes crash into Zito’s in the rearview mirror again. Zito’s face burns with the betrayal, though of course Munson has to know by now, he can’t have missed it. They’re too fucking close, family.

Everyone’s quiet. The jay circles once, then twice. Munson is darting looks at Chavez. Chavez is staring at Zito in the rearview, as if he’d like to climb back there and do the job right.

“I can’t believe you let me think it was just a regular year,” Munson says. He’s calmed, fuzzed, relaxed in the shotgun seat.

“It’s never a regular year,” Chavez answers. “But I’m sorry it took you by surprise.”

Munson waves his hand. He turns to look back at Zito. “And you, fucking man of mystery back there. Don’t really see the appeal of the middle-aged high school gym teacher, but hey.”

Zito laughs, his chest feeling broken. He kicks at Munson’s shoulder. “Age is just a number, motherfucker.”

Munson smiles and in the rearview, Chavez tips his head as if to say, nice one. The tension recedes, and they finish the joint companionably, talking about mundane things. The inside of the car is foggy; Zito’s high enough that he can pretend it’s steam.

“Billy fucking Beane,” Munson says thoughtfully at the ceiling. Zito rolls his shoulders.

“Yeah.”

“It’s a lot of trouble to go through, though, isn’t it?”

Munson would have no idea how to hide the fact that he was getting laid. Zito has walked in on him getting blown probably six times. He’s not sure if that’s the only thing that Munson’s talking about, though.

“It’s not so bad.” Stains on the ceiling, Cheerios crunching under his feet. Zito would hide for the rest of his life, fucking loves it, cloistered away, locked doors and fugitive alleys. Beane makes it better than a movie.

“You and him. It’s for real?” When Zito doesn’t answer, Munce turns to look between the seats. “Because it’s kinda crazy to be doing this without, like, reason.”

Zito hooks his fingers under the handle of the door. He’s remembering random old things, watching _Robocop_ on mute with Chavvy’s dad, because it didn’t count as R-rated if you couldn’t hear it, playing Connect Four in the attic when the heat was like water, biking with Munson and Chavez to the Circle K, nothing else to do on a Saturday afternoon.

“There’s reason,” Zito tells Munson. “I know what I’m doing, so it’s gonna be fine.”

“His sense of judgment is all screwed up, Munce. You can’t ask him questions and expect real answers.” Chavez passes the jay back to Zito, grinning at him. Zito sneers.

“Oh, and you’re such a fucking expert.”

Chavez lifts one shoulder. “Goddamn innocent bystander. Happened to fucking observe.”

“You haven’t been a _bystander_ since we were fifteen,” and then Zito bites the rest of that off, whatever he was going to say, whatever it is about Chavez that gets him riled up so fast, so carelessly. He shakes his head sharply, pressing his teeth into his lip and his thumbs against his eyes. “Forget it. I’m stuck like this, fine, I don’t care. You guys are supposed to, like, tell me it’s gonna be okay. Reassure me. I’ve had such a rough night.”

Chavez peeks around the side of the seat, finally. Zito thinks that the thing he knows best in the world is how Chavez’s eyes turn down at the corners when he’s tired or stoned.

“I hate lying to you,” Chavez tells him honestly, and Zito feels like he’s been thrown out of a moving car, his ribs punching into his lungs.

*

Zito stays away for almost a whole day, absently hoping that things will die down, but not really counting on it.

The whole school knows, looking at him out the corner of their eyes, talking behind their hands. Zito is surprised to find that he doesn’t really mind, thinking how much cooler he is with his grown-up scandal and his drinking problem. There are a half dozen versions of what exactly he and Beane were doing last night, repeated back to him like a dirty game of telephone.

But tomorrow is the last day of classes, and Zito is feeling groundless and free. He’s theoretically under house arrest, though his parents had stopped enforcing most rules by the time he was thirteen, exhausted after doing it for thirty years. They’re asleep and he’s crawling out his bedroom window, into the tree and then down to the yard. The bark has been worn away from the branches by his sneakers, over the years.

Zito runs from bus stop to bus stop, under the full trees, the soft summer air, salted and warm. He gets halfway to Beane’s place before the bus rolls up behind him, breathing raggedly in the last row.

Beane lets him in without hesitation, the television muttering from the other room, and takes Zito’s cap off his head.

“How’d I know I’d see you tonight?”

Zito pushes a hand through his hair to mess it up a little, and kinda smiles. “You’re a smart guy, Billy.”

Beane snorts, and turns away from Zito to go back into the living room, taking from off the side table a crystal-cut glass of something that looks expensive. Zito snickers inwardly. Lesson learned, apparently.

“Smart guy,” Beane echoes under his breath. “And yet. Fuckin’ let this happen.” He falls onto the couch, and Zito hovers near the edge of the rug, hands itching for his pockets.

“Are you okay?”

Beane grins, wide and false. He’s very drunk, Zito realizes. “Sure. Nothing left but time to kill.”

Zito sits down next to him, toeing off his sneakers and putting his feet on the coffee table. “Weird fucking day.”

“Yeah.”

“You know, that, like, when everybody’s looking at you and not even bothering to hide it?”

Beane coughs out a hard laugh. “I was one of the top prospects in the country. I know what that’s fucking like.”

Zito is not one of the top prospects in the country, but his best friend is, so he can appreciate the analogy. He places his fingers on Beane’s hip, not really thinking about it.

“Did anybody say anything to you? I mean, the school?” Zito asks.

Beane takes a drink, swallowing slowly. “Well. They fired me.”

Zito’s hand tightens on Beane’s hip. “What?”

“Driving under the influence. In the company of an eighteen year old boy. A student. Who was also drunk. At three in the morning. On a Tuesday.” Beane’s lips twist up. “They broke a fucking record, firing me.”

“Holy shit, Billy.” Zito sits up, his finger snagging in Beane’s belt loop. “Can they do that?”

Beane gives him a terrible look, and pulls away from Zito, back against the arm of the couch. It’s a dumb question, but to his credit, Zito knows that. Tapping his fingers on the glass, Beane says without much emotion:

“It was just a random thing, anyway. Come home and coach the team. It was this brilliant idea that I had when I hadn’t slept in four days. I wasn’t gonna be here for twenty years or something. I was passing through, that’s all.”

Zito folds his hands into fists on his knees. “I didn’t even think that anybody would find out.”

“Me neither. Which is really kinda remarkable, when you think of it. Like the worst thing that was gonna happen was gonna be you getting grounded.” Beane’s eyes get thin.   
“You haven’t heard from any of the colleges, right?”

“Not yet,” Zito answers. “Gotta think that Santa Barbara’s gonna pull the scholarship. Northridge had me on a wait list anyway. Most of the schools backed off after I lost the game, you know. This is just. Insult to injury.”

He shrugs, not liking the look on Beane’s face. Zito’s understanding of what will happen at the end of the summer is vague, at best, and he’d like to keep it that way for as long as possible.

“So. Two lives ruined. Pretty good for one night.” Beane is smiling at the glass in his hand, but he looks stricken anyway, torn up.

“What. What are you gonna do?” Zito catches his breath in the back of his throat. Dangerous question, Beane quiet and altered, not in the right state of mind. But they’ve been drunk for months, quite literally. It’s taken something out of them.

Beane tips his head to the side, breathes out. “Get out of this fucking town.”

“And go where?”

“Don’t really care, at this point. Away.”

Zito swallows, reaches out and takes the glass from Beane’s hand, Beane’s wrist turning easily. He finishes what’s left, cold burn down his throat and his head spins immediately. Beane is leaving and what does that mean, why does that make him shake like this?

“You could get another job. You don’t have to leave.”

There are char marks under the windowsill. Zito presses the curved edge of the glass into his kneecap, somehow fearful when the fit is perfect. Beane shakes his head, the lines of his face strict, his eyes half-closed and almost pained.

“I don’t want another job. Not here. I don’t want to see anything that I can remember. Supposed to be, _home_ , you’re supposed to be able to come home.” He presses his teeth into his lower lip, disgusted. “It’s bullshit. Broke my fucking legs. I’m gonna get as far away as I possibly can.”

Zito is fiercely confused for a moment, not sure how Beane can be thinking of this, saying it out loud like it’s a given. Beane refills the glass and takes it back from him, his face angled down, streetlit through the window.

“That is no kind of plan,” he says a little desperately. “You can’t just up and leave. You have obligations. Responsibilities.”

Beane lifts the glass, mouth twisting sardonically, “Five hundred dollars to break my lease, and I’m gone. See how long before the money runs out.”

“Quit it.” Zito punches him in the side. “Take this seriously.”

Settling, Beane looks over at him through slitted eyes, the back of his hand against Zito’s leg.

“I did take it seriously. Pros and fucking cons. Holes in the plan. Contingencies and loose ends. I’ve been home since ten a.m. I’ve fucking _mapped_ it.”

Beane halves what’s in the glass and passes it off, rhythm between them and Beane’s face flushing, yellow light in his eyes.

“This is what I’m doing,” he concludes. “This is absolutely my best option.”

Zito bites his tongue to keep from saying anything. He punches Beane again, on the leg this time, but it’s a lost-argument blow, painless and soft. He considers the long season ahead, the odd hours he’ll keep with his summer job and the way he’d planned to lie around in Beane’s apartment until two in the afternoon, five in the morning. A sudden surgical removal of Billy Beane, his beat-up foreign car, his adjacent liquor store, the times when Zito falls asleep on Beane’s couch.

The idea, when it occurs to him, is inspired.

“I’m coming with you.”

Beane’s eyes snap to his. Zito tenses slowly, clenching his hand on the glass. He can count Beane’s pulse through his wrist, pressed easy against Zito’s leg, still enough to feel it through the denim.

“Right.” Beane glances away, then back.

“I am. We can go wherever you want. But you’re taking me.” Zito holds it like an article of faith, widening his eyes at Beane.

“Who says you’re invited?” Beane asks, trying to play it off.

“I’ll fucking hide in your trunk, Billy, don’t test me.” Zito exhales. “What, I got so much more to stick around for than you do?”

Beane nods quickly. “You do. Yeah. You got your friends, your folks. Whole life is here.”

“My parents and I pass in the kitchen sometimes. My friends. My friends can take care of each other.”

Zito swallows, thinking for the first time about Munson and Chavez, wondering if it will be like losing fingers to leave them. Wondering who will keep them from killing each other, or even something worse. They’ve got a puzzle to finish on the table in Chavez’s attic. Zito’s got to be there on draft day, they all promised.

Beane is studying him, shadows under his eyes. They really have to get more sleep, badly in need of a vacation.

“So, what, little post-graduation road trip? Follow me around until I find a good place to stop?”

Beane is sneering, but Zito’s throat catches. “That. That sounds okay.”

“You’re out of your fucking mind.”

“You told me that already.” Zito grins, his heart pounding hard, and shifts so that his knee is atop Beane’s. “Billy, it’s the summertime. I got nothing to do. Nowhere to be. I plan to spend at least eight hours a day as drunk as I can manage. And it’s. I could do that in your car.”

Pulling minutely under Zito’s knee, but not enough to disentangle them, Beane curves his hand and presses his knuckles down on Zito’s leg. “And then? Eventually I gotta drive you all the way back down here?”

Zito shakes his head, looking down. “Let’s just. Let’s not worry about what’s gonna happen after. I think things will be clearer once we’re somewhere different.”

Quiet for a moment, listening to the cars go by down on the street and the buckled crackling sound of laughter, kids at the liquor store. Zito hopes that Beane refills the glass soon, hopes that Beane tells him okay.

“This isn’t, like.” Beane stops, pushes his thumb against the seam of Zito’s jeans. “It’s not some adventure. I’ve kinda royally fucked up my life. Again. This is a terrible thing to have to do.”

Zito moves closer, picturing highways. “Maybe so. But I’m in. You fucked up your life for me. I’m goddamn well gonna pay you back for that.”

Beane puts his hand on his face, sighing. Zito touches Beane’s belt with his fingers, close enough to see the taut places at the corners of his mouth, the strung way he’s holding himself.

“Leaving in the morning,” Beane says eventually, under his breath. “Or. Now.”

Zito’s mind gets away from him for a moment, shocked to his core that Beane has said yes. Flight like potential in his bloodstream. His hands close on Beane’s shirt and Zito is grinning, sharp and bright, and Beane’s hand is on the side of his neck.

Zito can’t cope with it, burying his face into Beane’s throat for a moment before pulling back. Beane is warm as anything, scuffed and hard.

“Give me two hours,” Zito whispers, and then he’s up, forcing his hands away from Beane, taking the stairs four at a time.

*

They’re not in Munson’s backyard, so Zito drives over to Chavez’s house, streets that he knows perhaps better than anything. The clouds overhead are breaking up, tines of moonlight on the scrub grass of the sidewalk. Zito goes around back and reaches to get the key from on top of the doorframe, remembering when he used to have to climb onto the windowsill to get it.

Soft-footed on the linoleum of the kitchen floor, and Zito is practicing in his head. I’ve got to go. I know what I’m doing. It’s just gonna be for a little while.

They lie to each other a lot; Zito doesn’t think either of them will call him out on it.

The couch in the living room is folded out, sheets wrenched across it and Munson and Chavez asleep, the video game controllers still wrapped around their wrists. Zito walks silently through the debris and sits on the red-and-orange plaid arm of the couch, long slow pain in his chest, thinking about getting back to Billy Beane.

He wakes them up, saying their names softly, kicking at them. Chavez is shirtless and mumbling, knocking his elbow into Munce’s head when he sits up.

“The fuck are you doing here?” Chavez asks, yawning. Munson is peering at him from one eye, still lying down.

Zito laces his hands together. “I’m taking off for a while.”

“You haven’t _been_ here, what do you mean you’re taking off?” Chavez is glaring, spoiling for a fight, black-wrecked hair, knotted fist on Munson’s hip.

“No, man. With Billy. He’s leaving town and I thought I’d. Thought I’d go with him.”

Chavez turns all eyes and mouth, digging his fist into Munson. Munson sits up in increments, blinking at him stickily.

“You’re kidding?” Munson asks.

Zito looks down at the sheets, the tangle of wires. Weeks he’s spent on the fold-out bed, when they were small enough to fit three, one sleeping at the foot of the bed perpendicular to the other two. Cold cereal without milk and VHS movies taped off basic cable, commercialed and cut up.

“For real. I’m just. It’s like the only thing I can think to do.”

Chavez shakes his head, disbelieving. “Well, you could think about fucking _not_. Running away from home? How old are you, eight?”

Zito almost laughs, coughs it away. “It’s, whatever. School’s out. There’s no reason not to go.”

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“I, um. I’m not sure. Job? Maybe try out for an independent team or something.” Zito pushes a hand through his hair, his throat slick and his hands trembling. He can’t look at them, thinking of all the times Chavez had said, let’s just get the hell out of here, and they’d never done anything about it.

“This is fucked up,” Munson says suddenly, catching Zito off-guard. “This is our last summer. You’re not allowed to leave before our last summer.”

Ducking his head, Zito flinches. “Munce, you know I wouldn’t. It’s not like you guys aren’t, because I mean, obviously, you’re my best friends and I wouldn’t leave, not if it wasn’t, like, necessary. He’s. He’s become very important to me.”

He’s blushing bad, his shoulders up. Chavez is staring at him like when they used to throw rocks at each other’s heads. Munson’s eyes flicker, admirably quick for the hour.

“What about the draft?”

Zito shrugs. “I’m not gonna get drafted. Not high enough to matter. And anything happens, I can deal with it when I come back.”

“Which is gonna be when, exactly?”

There’s a sheet crease on Chavez’s face, making him look almost branded in the dim light. Zito is a little afraid of him, the power that Chavez has always had.

“I don’t know. We’re not, like. On a fucking timetable.”

But Zito’s thinking, so many roads in this country, so much asphalt and gravel on the shoulder. Weeks and months in the shotgun seat, in the thick heart of summer, and maybe they’ll get lost or sidetracked or something. Maybe they’ll find someplace that they won’t want to leave right away.

Munson leans into Chavez, shock and exhaustion too much for him. Zito checks himself before he can say he’s sorry.

“This is crazy,” Chavez whispers, shifting so that Munson’s shoulder tocks in place against his chest. “You recognize that this is totally insane, right?”

Zito nods, his mouth dry. “I’ve got to, Ricky. You have to remember what this is like.”

Chavez looks up at him sharply, possibly remembering the same thing as Zito, the night out by the reservoir when they were fifteen, swearing over the sound of the water that they would do anything, go anywhere. “We were just kids.”

Zito smiles tiredly. “And it’s different now. I know. But I wouldn’t be okay if he left without me. That’s not something I can get over twice.”

Chavez winces hard, his hand closing on Munson’s wrist. Munson looks between the two of them like he’s always known, resigned and sad, and Zito can see that Chavez is wrong about Munson not thinking about him like that, see the way Munson turns his hand and tests Chavez’s grip.

They don’t say anything for a while, birds starting up outside, the creeping sensation of the sun just under the curve of the horizon. Zito thinks about the place Munson and Chavez have inside him, the better part of his history, what he means when he says home.

Chavez fits his fingers across Munson’s pulse, says with his eyes down, “You can go as long as you promise to come back.” Munson draws in a breath and nods, whickered color in his eyes trained on Zito’s face.

Zito wipes his eyes with the side of his wrist, nodding without hesitation. “Of course. Of course I’m coming back. Come on.”

He reaches out for Chavez, and Chavez falls against his arm, easy to lean down and kiss the corner of Chavez’s mouth. Munson’s hand touches Zito’s shoulder, and Zito presses into it, resting his forehead on Chavez’s cheek.

*

It’s the work of twenty minutes to get his stuff packed. Zito exists in a constant state of emergency, clean shirts spilling out of the hamper, books and socks and his mitt, his camera. The sun is coming up and Zito is nervous as hell, wanting to get Beane in his sights again.

He leaves a brief note for his parents, vague even by his standards, and takes three apples and two bottles of orange juice from the refrigerator. The house settles around him, and he gets his sleeping bag out of the garage, finds a Polaroid of him and Munson and Chavez, last year after they won the league, white and red with arms around each other’s shoulders, a huge shiny sun filling the upper corner. Zito puts the photo in the shoebox with his baseball cards, packs it with the rest of his gear.

He leaves without looking back.

Driving over to Beane’s, Zito cannot see for the sun, his heartbeat off-rhythm and atonal. He can feel pieces break off the farther away he gets, broken open and new as he crosses his fingers and hopes that Beane hasn’t lied and left without him.

But Beane is there in the street when Zito pulls up, sitting in the open door of his car, his hands between his knees. Zito watches him, diagonal shadow of the door across his body, the baseball visible in his hand even through the dusty windshield.

Zito gets out, wind strong and tearing through his hair. It’s dawn and Beane stands as Zito approaches. Zito tries to think straight, tries to think that this is where his life starts, this is the thing that happens before everything else, but maybe that’s not right.

Maybe nothing will happen after this. Maybe this will go on forever.

*

It’s most of the summer, before Beane comes to terms with what’s happened to him.

He remembers it clearly, waking up one morning in a motel room somewhere in Idaho. Hot outside already, heavy air, crummy queen-sized bed, because they got over discreet in that roadhouse parking lot, before they were out of Nevada, when they figured out that between pissed-off eighteen year old boy and all the force in Beane’s body, they could take fucking anybody who had a problem with it.

Waking up and getting coffee, mid-morning, and they’re living on savings, the distant remains of Beane’s major league salaries. Zito is up when Beane gets back, his shirt back on, hair pushed down in some semblance of normality, watching Cartoon Network. Their one requirement in a place to sleep is cable television. They haven’t left the room in two days, ordering delivery, baseball games on TBS and WGN, playing cards and reading unorthodox books from the Midwest, talking about Bill James and what it could mean.

Beane hands Zito the coffee and muffin he got for him at the café down the street. Little nothing town in the middle of nowhere. Zito smiling at him and pulling his legs over so Beane can sit down.

Zito is there all the time, ten-minute calls to his parents twice a week, just, I’m okay, I don’t know when I’ll be back. Zito with his knees on the glove compartment and the window down, wearing sunglasses and telling Beane that what they need is a convertible. Zito deep into the night, the television on, Zito warm right up against him.

Zito keeps watch for cop cars, because Beane is driving without a license. Bizarre to travel at the speed limit, though the scenery hasn’t changed much since they got away from the coast. Zito switches places with him at truck stops, colorless sky and million-watt floodlights spreading out like a flattened sun. Zito finally develops a taste for black coffee and cracks his back with his hands on the roof of the car.

They get Zito’s diploma by mail, to a P.O. Box that they rented when they stopped for three weeks near the ocean outside Santa Cruz, and Zito makes a paper airplane out of it, but afterwards rubs it smooth and flat, folds it up and puts it into one of the spiral notebooks he’s still got.

On the day of the draft, Beane thinks there’s no chance Zito will stay until the sun goes down, and Chavez goes at ten and Munson goes at sixty-two. They hunch around the rented laptop, the illegal dial-up connection, counting the names as they roll by, and Zito sits back when Chavez is called, astonishment across his face like even this was more than he expected.

And Munson on the other end of the line, sighing, “I’m going surfing,” when Zito calls him in a panic. Munson, who is nowhere near a phone or a television or a radio when he gets drafted, is honestly the last to know.

Zito is taken in the fifty-ninth round, long after they’ve stopped paying attention.

It’s okay, because Beane hears them later, Zito in the single motel room chair, his feet on the windowsill, turned to look out at the parking lot. A three-way call, all this clever technology, and Zito’s voice breaking when he talks to Chavez, low and hoarse when he talks to Munson.

It looks really fucking difficult, restructuring a life the way Zito is. They’re all day in the car and Zito is drunk in the afternoon, but not so much in the morning anymore.

Beane is waiting, without pause, for the day when Zito decides that he’s had enough, back to pretty San Diego and no more of this army life. Not all the colleges stopped wanting Zito after the Night They Got Arrested, but the deadlines are a few days from passing, Zito’s last chance to salvage something that came before.

Beane can’t imagine that Zito will stick around. They are nowhere, talking only to each other for days on end. Zito is disastrously young, shaking and gleaming, so fucking happy to be out here and still in motion, but something like this never lasts.

The awareness of the fragility of Zito’s presence makes everything narrowed and golden. Beane spends all day talking about second chances, and by the end of it, he’s not talking about the team anymore. He puts his hands on Zito to be sure of his place in the world, Zito a keystone to the unanchored drift of the past two months, or not a keystone really, not an infielder, and occasionally they toss a baseball around in the room. They’re working their way up to playing catch in the daylight again, a week or two before they’ll be dreaming of grass.

The summer’s ending and that’s an important thing; if this crosses over into the school year, it will be something different. Everything can still be explained, temporary insanity, best defense because Zito is young and impressionable, and Beane is having an early midlife crisis.

But it’s like they’re not even really running away anymore. Beane doesn’t care where they go, and Zito drives them in ever-widening circles, carves their names into a rock wall with his penknife. It doesn’t feel temporary at all, motel pools and New Mexico in a windstorm, sitting on top of a Little League bandstand watching a game, Beane telling Zito about something that happened fifteen years ago. It’s like he can rewrite his whole life this way, watching Zito snicker and pull his hand across his mouth.

They’re heading in a semi-easterly direction. They travel at night when the sun seems to melt their windshield, and Zito is wired on caffeine pills and aspirin, his hand twisted in Beane’s shirt, fabric drawn tight against Beane’s side.

Beane tells him there’s a fifth in the glovebox, and Zito grins like Christmas, curls up around the bottle. By the time they stop for the night, Zito is badly turned around, half-drunk and his blood streaming hard. He topples Beane onto the bed and matchbooks from diners rain from his pockets.

An hour or two or three, no way to gauge time out here, Beane lifts his head from Zito’s back and tells him, “Tomorrow-”

Zito rolls, hot slick shoulder against Beane’s chest. He buries his face in the bed. “Yeah. I think we go much farther north we’re gonna hit snow.” He pauses. “But maybe snow would be okay.”

Red light on the sheets now, having landed somewhere with neon at last, and Beane lays his fingers down carefully on the edge of Zito’s ribs. He thinks about Wrigley Field, thinks that they can’t possibly have made Chicago this quick. They’re so far out, no one chasing them, the leaves changing color, and Beane can believe for a moment that the theft of baseball has been made bearable by the life he’s recovered here. It’s an easy sacrifice, too-simple redemption.

Beane falls asleep, his hand on Zito’s side. They stay like that for a very long time.

THE END

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Actually Happened Like This](https://archiveofourown.org/works/263312) by [candle_beck](https://archiveofourown.org/users/candle_beck/pseuds/candle_beck)
  * [Three Yard Radius](https://archiveofourown.org/works/263336) by [candle_beck](https://archiveofourown.org/users/candle_beck/pseuds/candle_beck)




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